There was a time when American philosophers brought passion and clarity to the major social and political events of their day. Without the words of Thoreau and Emerson, the great abolitionist John Brown could have gone down in history as a deranged terrorist.1 Nor did the two men confine themselves to giving speeches that argued for Brown’s heroism and his cause. They actively, and illegally, helped his coconspirators escape to Canada. (Emerson lent the horse; Thoreau drove the wagon.) At the age of seventy-eight, John Dewey went to Mexico to preside over the tribunal that absolved Leon Trotsky of Stalin’s allegations. Dewey received death threats for his pains. In 1897 William James gave the oration at the dedication to Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s monument to Colonel Robert Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Brought back to recent memory in the movie Glory, the 54th was the first company of African Americans to fight in the Civil War. Half of them lost their lives in the brave attempt to capture Fort Wagner. James’s youngest brother, Wilkie, was gravely wounded in the battle.
James’s speech is worth reading, for it illuminates what matters in contemporary debates about historical monuments. Some insist that those debates are about “heritage, not hate.” In fact they are about neither. Few of the people who support retaining Confederate monuments actively hate black people. This is partly because you needn’t be a Freudian to know that not every emotion is conscious. Even more important, the debates are not really about affect at all, despite all the emotion they raise. They are about the values we deliberately choose to hold—though emotions will inevitably attach to those values, as they should. James’s speech reveals, with great passion, why monuments are made.
The war for our Union … has … but one meaning in the eye of history And nowhere was that meaning better symbolized and embodied than in the constitution of this first Negro regiment.
Look at that monument and read the story … There on foot go the dark outcasts … State after state by its laws had denied them to be human persons … The bronze that makes their memory eternal betrays the very soul and secret of those awful years.
Since the ’thirties the slavery question had been the only question, and by the end of the ’fifties our land lay sick and shaking with it like a traveler who has thrown himself down at night in a pestilential swamp and in the morning finds the fever through the marrow of his bones.2
James continues with thoughts that could have been expressed yesterday.
Our great western republic had from its very origin been a singular anomaly. A land of freedom, boastfully so called, with human slavery enthroned at the heart of it … what was it but a thing of falsehood and horrible self-contradiction?… But at last that republic was torn in two, and truth was to be possible under the flag. Truth, thank God, truth! even though for the moment it must be truth written in hell-fire.3
At the time James was writing, that truth was beginning to be obscured by legions of historians and popular fictions deliberately constructed to destroy those gains that still remained after Reconstruction. Since the violent protests over the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, contemporary historians have filled pages of newsprint with information many of us never knew. Most of the statues that commemorate the Confederacy were built some fifty years after the war, as the sons, and particularly the daughters, of the Confederacy worked to create the myth of the Lost Cause. The second wave of monument making occurred in the early 1960s, in response to the success of the first desegregation campaigns. The monuments were not innocuous shrines to history; they were provocative assertions of white supremacy at moments when its defenders felt under threat. Knowing when they were built is part of knowing why they were built.
James emphasized that the monument he praised was not only a tribute to the military values that Shaw and his soldiers upheld as they fought to the death on a lone Carolina beach. Shaw had, James wrote, civil courage.4 Blessed in his life, happy in his former regiment, the white officer Shaw nevertheless accepted command of the first black company. “In this new Negro soldier venture, loneliness was inevitable, ridicule certain, failure possible.” Yet “Shaw recognized the vital opportunity; he saw that the time had come when the colored people must put the country in their debt.” For “our nation had been founded in what we may call our American religion, baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well enough together if left free to try.”5
The civil courage that led Shaw to give up an easy berth in order to take on an assignment that he believed embodied those American ideals is, James continued, a lonely sort of courage. It is
the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be built … The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties.6
James’s speech makes it clear: monuments are not about history; they are values made visible. That’s why we build memorials to some parts of history and ignore others. They embody the ideals we choose to honor, in the hopes of reminding ourselves and our children that those ideals were actually embodied by brave men and women. What is at stake is not the past, but the present and future. When we choose to memorialize a historical moment, we are choosing the values we want to defend, and pass on.
The 2017 demonstrations against the planned removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, established one thing beyond doubt: Nazis are not just a German problem. You may prefer to call the demonstrators white supremacists, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The deliberate use of Nazi symbols—swastikas, torches—and slogans—Blood and Soil! Jews will not replace us!—leaves no room for doubt. Not everyone who wants to preserve those symbols is a Nazi. But American Nazis’ embrace of the Confederate cause made clear that anyone who fights for those symbols is fighting for values that unite Nazis with racists of all varieties.
One argument for removing Confederate statues is that they hurt some people who have to walk the public space in which they’re displayed. A descendant of enslaved people will feel injured when she walks by a bronze paean to a person who fought to keep her ancestors enchained. I think I understand how she feels. Germany has no statues of Nazis, but I’ve tried to imagine how I’d feel if it did, lining those streets I have come to love. Would I think, This is a statue of someone who would have killed me if given half a chance? Would I get used to the statue and simply walk by, suppressing fear and resentment all the while? I am certain I could not have stayed, or chosen to raise children, in a place where every town chose to erect a monument to Johnny Reb—call him Hans Wehrmacht—for all those who died serving the Nazi regime. But why is that?
I think it is more about reason than emotion. A hypothetical Germany still valorizing soldiers who served a murderous cause would have failed to reject that cause itself. No matter that many soldiers who fell were not true believers, but men convinced they were fulfilling a duty to protect the Fatherland, or even poor fellows who were drafted without any conviction at all. A somber, valiant figure dignified in bronze or stone has a way of lending dignity to the cause itself. Placing it in public space reflects, at the very best, ambivalence about the values for which that soldier died, whether or not any particular soldier shared them. How much more when the figure is a general whose allegiance to the cause was clear!
Germany has no Hans Wehrmacht statues, and certainly none to Rommel, usually considered the least noxious of Hitler’s generals. Like most of my German friends, I thought it had no monuments to German soldiers at all, until an expert on German memory alerted me to the exception. In Friedland, a small town near Göttingen that had served as a transit camp for German refugees and soldiers, Adenauer laid the foundation stone for a monument in 1966. It is completely abstract; only its size has heroic dimensions. The monument doesn’t valorize Wehrmacht soldiers who returned from POW camps in the Soviet Union, but it does place them in the center of suffering, along with those Germans who lost their homes to Allied bombers or the Polish takeover of East Prussia. The committee that designed it refused to mention survivors of concentration camps. All that hints at the suffering Germans caused is a reference to the fact that “fifty million lost their lives in the war,” with no indication of how or why.7 The memorial, wrote Aleida Assmann, was already outdated when it was finished in 1967, and it is virtually unknown in Germany today. The children of the former POWs, who were instrumental in creating the monument, have learned another set of values. They recoil from the thought of honoring men who fought for the right to eradicate other human beings. As a matter of value, we should recoil from a monument to honor men who fought for the right to own them. So much for Robert E. Lee.
This is about principle, not personal pain or tribal loyalty. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt argued that Eichmann should have been tried for crimes against humanity, not—as the indictment read—crimes against the Jewish people. In the days before competitive victimhood became a major sport, she may not have realized what an important distinction she’d drawn. Still, she was prescient; the distinction becomes more important every day. The murder of millions of Jews is a crime not only against a particular tribe but against the very idea of humanity, and it is principally as human beings, not as Jews, that we abhor and remember it. The crime we call the Holocaust—an attempt to wipe out a slice of humankind simply for belonging to a particular tribe—was an attack on the idea of humankind itself, which is part of the reason why so much of humankind, Jewish or not, recognizes it as the standard of evil.
The images of cattle cars, gas chambers, and ovens are seared into whatever collective memory we have, but we don’t need them to acknowledge a crime against humanity. I support Black Lives Matter not from tribal loyalty or even tribal guilt, but because the killing of unarmed civilians will always be a crime against humankind itself. This is a universalist position. At the same time, I reject the empty and misleading universalism of groups upholding the slogan “All lives matter.” They do, of course, but to say this is to substitute a banal and trivial truth for an important empirical one. It thereby distracts from the fact that African Americans are seven times more likely to die from police brutality than anyone else in America—according to the lowest estimates.8 To understand this, of course, we need to understand the difference between universal and particular truths. In the present age, it may be enough to hold fast to the ideal of truth at all.9
There is no hard data on the relations between the occurrence of violence and monuments to racist values. They are distinct, and violence can occur even when a state explicitly rejects racism and builds monuments to warn against it. Since 2000, German law has rejected the connection between German citizenship and German blood. The country is sprinkled with state-sponsored monuments to victims of racism, yet some of these monuments have been defaced, and right-wing racist sentiment has recently grown. Still, violence is more likely to occur when states subtly and suggestively support racism by supporting the valorization of those who fought and fell to maintain it. In Britain, an unprecedented rise in hate crimes has been documented since the Brexit vote, and the same is true in the United States since Trump took office.10
You’re more likely to notice a monument when you find yourself in a strange city. You might rub Pushkin’s nose for luck in Odessa or sit down next to Albert Einstein in Sedona—just to name two non-martial heroes honored in bronze. You may strain to remember what Admiral Nelson did that merited so high a column flanked by so many pigeons. Maybe you wonder when westerners began collecting obelisks, those phallic Egyptian mysteries thought worthy of venerating the first American president. Mostly you walk by in a hurry on your way to the office or the supermarket, hoping you’ll finish all the tasks on today’s agenda without getting too distracted to write the delicate email or pick up a loaf of bread for the morning. Living just outside Boston for eight years, I never saw the monument that William James so gloriously described.
If monuments are values made visible, it’s likely you ignore the ones around you. Values are most visible when they’re under threat. Otherwise they are precisely the things you take for granted, like the monuments themselves. All the more reason you may become attached to those that surrounded you as you grew. What you remember is less the monument itself, but the moments of your life that happened around it: the time you hid behind it while playing hooky or kissed in its shadow. The monument you barely noticed becomes a physical reminder of home, and you feel homeless, just a little, when it’s gone.11 Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that what residents of New Orleans miss, when they miss the now-absent Confederate statues, is not a symbol of Confederate ideology, but the feeling of being at home in the world. They’d walked, or more likely driven, right past it all their lives. But they are also missing a symbol of an ideology that refused to allow that feeling for others—who were literally not wanted, except as servants, and who could never be at home while it stood.
Participating in Southern debates about Confederate monuments led me to try, over and over, to imagine a Germany filled with monuments to the men who fought for the Nazis. My imagination failed. For anyone who has lived in contemporary Germany, the vision of statues honoring those men is inconceivable. Even those who privately mourn for family members lost at the front, knowing that only a fraction of the Wehrmacht belonged to the Nazi Party, know that their loved ones cannot be publically honored without honoring the cause for which they died.
The German language occasionally uses the word Monument (emphasis on the last syllable) for the English word monument (emphasis on the first), but terms that have no English equivalent are more common. A Denkmal commemorates an event that needs to be thought about. If the event was particularly horrendous, a Mahnmal (warning sign) may be erected. For monuments to horror that are large—a restored concentration camp, for example—Gedenkstätte (place of reflection) is the likely term. The root word is denken (to think), and it signals the enormous amount of thought devoted to the question: What do we remember in matter, and how?
When William James was writing, it seemed clear that monuments were only raised to heroes. History was written by history’s winners, and its losers merited no immortal attention. It’s the itch for eternity that makes us remember in marble and bronze. They may not last forever, but they will last much longer than we will. In recent years, Germany has raised monuments to World War II’s real heroes—those who risked or gave their lives to oppose the Nazis—as well as to the war’s victims. There is also a set of monuments focused on the perpetrators as well as their victims: the concentration camps, for instance, the House of the Wannsee Conference, or the Gestapo torture chambers in Berlin. They are meant to honor the victims by showing how their tormentors functioned. All told, since 1945 Germany has spent more than a billion dollars building monuments to commemorate the Holocaust and many millions every year to maintain them. What’s absent is any monument to those who created and fought the war.
Germans find the death penalty unconscionable because of the way it was used during the Nazi period. “That consciousness comes from an understanding that the Holocaust was shameful,” said Bryan Stevenson. “We would not respect or work with Germany had they erected hundreds of Hitler statues throughout the country. If they were romanticizing Nazism, creating a narrative about World War II that said it wasn’t really about Jews, it wasn’t about world domination, it wasn’t about Aryan supremacy, it was about something else—which is what we’ve done in this country—I certainly wouldn’t have gone to Germany.”
Stevenson is an African American lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, which has saved hundreds of prisoners from death row. He is also the creator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial. After reading his stunning book Just Mercy, I was hesitant to ask for an interview: Wouldn’t whatever I took of his time be better spent saving someone’s life? “Thanks for coming to spend time with us” was his gracious reply to my apology for interrupting his work. Stevenson is the only national figure on record who took German confrontation with its bloody past as a model for what Americans should do with ours, and I wanted to know how he got there. An exceptionally busy man, Stevenson was kind, almost serene, when I entered his office in Montgomery.
“We’re sitting in a building that’s on the site of a former slave warehouse,” he told me. “A hundred meters from here is the river where tens of thousands of enslaved people were brought by rail and boat. The slave auction site is literally a hundred meters up the street. If you came here three years ago, you’d find fifty-nine markers and memorials to the Confederacy, and not a word about slaves, in the public landscape.” The difference between the United States and Germany, says Stevenson, is leadership. In Germany, “There were people who said ‘We can choose to be a Germany of the past or a Germany of the future. We cannot do it by trying to reconcile the Nazi era with what we want to be. Either we’re going to reject that and claim something better, or we’re going to be condemned by that for the rest of our existence.’ That was something that never happened in the United States.”
Besides leadership, Stevenson thinks that what’s missing in America is shame. Recent backlash notwithstanding, there is an American consensus that slavery was wrong. But even among descendants of slave-owning families, shame is hard to find. Regret is there, sometimes even remorse. Meetings between descendants of slave owners and descendants of people their forebears owned have taken place in several states. Some descendants of slave owners are appalled by the oppression their ancestors maintained. But the national sense of disgrace that led so many Germans to pass themselves off as Danish or Dutch is entirely absent; it is not the American way. Americans are inclined to believe in American exceptionalism, although those who insist the country is the greatest on earth are usually those who’ve never stepped outside its borders. They believe the country may have made some … mistakes in its past, but nothing so severe as to damage national pride. Stevenson believes that the mere recognition that slavery was wrong is not enough. “Without shame, you don’t actually correct. You don’t do things differently. You don’t acknowledge.” Guilt, it’s been argued, is directed inward, and no one need know if you have it. Shame, by contrast, is what you feel when you see yourself reflected through others’ eyes and you cannot bear to let that image stand. To overcome shame, you must actually do something to show others you are not inevitably caught in your, or your forebears’, worst moments.
“What’s fascinating to me,” said Stevenson, “is that the Charleston shooting did something few things have done in the last half century. It actually made many white people ashamed. They increased the shame quotient because someone cloaked in a Confederate identity goes into a church and slaughters nine black people while they’re praying. If he had gone into the projects and killed nine people, the flag would still be standing.” But Stevenson has no illusions about the breadth of that shame. “It was just a moment.” He doubts that Nikki Haley would have been reelected in South Carolina after directing the flag’s removal, nor does he think the governor of Alabama, who followed Haley in removing that Confederate symbol, would have been removed from office for a sex scandal had he left the flag standing.
Initially, it was neither leadership nor shame that assured the absence of Hitler statues in the landscape of Germany. For that we can thank the Allies, and the fact that the Third Reich was so short-lived. A 1945 joint Allied directive outlawed “the planning, designing, erection, installation, posting or other display of any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve or keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party, or which is of such a nature to glorify incidents of war.”12 But apart from street names and iron swastikas that studded some buildings, the Allies had little to remove. No statue of Hitler existed. He preferred to have himself enshrined in names of streets and squares, which were promptly renamed after the war. The giant architectural projects the Nazis had planned were largely incomplete; the empire that was meant to last a thousand years was defeated after twelve. Still, there might have been a wave of reaction decades later, like the one that left Confederate statues all over the South. Instead, Allied troops remained in Germany for nearly half a century, while the federal troops that prevented the South from glorifying the Confederacy withdrew after ten years. Yet fear of the Allied Occupation was hardly all that prevented postwar glorification of the Nazis. Shame played a major role, and it led not only to the absence of Nazi monuments but to the erection of thousands of monuments to their victims.
With the rise of the AfD, shame has become a subject of recent German discourse. In 2017, Björn Höcke, one of the AfD’s more radical members, shocked Germany by criticizing the Holocaust Memorial that covers the huge piece of prime real estate next to Brandenburg Gate. Höcke, long associated with neo-Nazi publications, said, “We Germans are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of our capital.” He went on to say that the reeducation begun in 1945 had robbed Germans of their identity, and he attacked Weizsäcker’s famous 1985 speech as a “speech against his own people.”
Reactions to Höcke’s speech were swift and sharp. Even the AfD considered throwing him out of their party, though they dropped the motion after some debate. Höcke had broken the taboos that have become foundational for the reunified German state. During the 1984 controversy over Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s joint visit with Ronald Reagan to the Bitburg cemetery where members of the Waffen-SS were buried, the chancellor claimed he had the “mercy of a late birth.” The suggestion was that he, like anyone born just before or after the Nazis came to power, had no responsibility for their crimes and hence no particular relationship to them. Even in the ’80s, the suggestion was roundly criticized, and the phrase “mercy of a late birth” became a black-humored trope. No one believes that anyone like Kohl, who was three years old when the Nazis came to power, should be held responsible for them. But the German nation as a whole recognized a collective responsibility to remember, and do what it can to atone for their crimes.
If this idea, like Weizsäcker’s speech expressing it, was already common in liberal circles in the 1980s, it became national consensus in the 1990s. That’s why the giant Holocaust Memorial was built. Although I, like a number of critics, am no admirer of the form the memorial took, I admire the impulse behind it. A nation that erects a monument of shame for the evils of its history in its most prominent space is a nation that is not afraid to confront its own failures.
Höcke is right about one thing: no other nation in the world has ever done so. Britain’s erection of a statue of Gandhi in front of the Houses of Parliament could be considered a start, as it implicitly suggests that Gandhi was right. But there’s no monument remembering the victims of colonial famines and massacres, although a monument to the victims—or heroes, as they are called in Kenya—was erected in 2015 as part of an out-of-court settlement in which Kenyans sued the UK government for compensation for its bloody suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. It stands, however, in Nairobi, where it’s rather unlikely to be seen by a British schoolchild. Even so, those are steps ahead of French practice, which still has no public marker remembering the Algerian War. Though an African American museum and a Native American museum now grace the Washington Mall, no monument to the victims of slavery and genocide can be found there. (“The African American museum is wonderful,” said Stevenson, “but most visitors go straight to Michael Jackson’s glove.”) No one erected a monument listing at least the numbers, if not the names, of more than a million Vietnamese slain in what they call the American War, next to Maya Lin’s memorial to what we call the Vietnam one. Lin’s decision not to valorize, but simply name, the American troops who fell was so politically controversial at the time that no one, apparently, thought of going further. Traditionally, after all, monuments are not built to remember failures.
Germany’s unflinching memorialization of its failures is not a panacea. The rebuilding of Berlin that took place throughout the 1990s was a mind-numbingly discursive process in which historians, politicians, and citizens debated for a decade. Some choices, like the number of glass walls in new government buildings, can seem clumsy. But even if you grow weary of the seas of glass, you may admire the aspiration behind them: democracy should be transparent. No one, least of all a German, would claim that the rebuilding and renaming eradicated the roots of racism and militarism. Old resentments die slowly, though they do eventually die, unless demagogues deliberately revive them. The city was not rebuilt to reflect what is, but what ought to be. Berlin’s public space represents a conscious decision about what values the reunited republic should commit itself to holding. The understanding that those values can only be truly embraced if we acknowledge the times when they were flouted is an understanding that real pride entails facing up to shame.
This kind of understanding fueled the furor over Höcke’s speech, a furor that included not only verbal critique but a material response. The Center for Political Beauty, an activist group whose earlier performance pieces supporting refugees gained national political attention, rented a property directly facing Höcke’s house in a Thuringian village. Supported through crowdfunding, the group stealthily built replicas of twenty-four of the pillars that make up the Holocaust Memorial—directly visible from Höcke’s front windows. They offered to remove them if Höcke would take a leaf from Willy Brandt, kneeling before the world in apology for German crimes. Some critics called the action bad taste, Höcke called it terrorism, and the little field where the pillars stand was closed to the public after the artists received death threats. Still, they stand, as of this writing, as an example of creative possibility in confronting the rising right. I don’t expect them to change Höcke, but the Center for Political Beauty was not interested in conversion. They believed that a provocation as deliberate as Höcke’s should be answered in kind.
There are monuments in Berlin that I prefer to the Holocaust Memorial. Besides the moving memorial to the Red Army at Treptow, there’s a monument in the Rosenstrasse that is usually empty, though it stands on a side street just off busy Alexanderplatz. The monument consists of a little park with three reddish sandstone sculptures carved by Ingeborg Hunzinger, a Jewish artist who grew up in East Germany. A tall, round column beside the park tells the story of the largest and only successful nonviolent protest that took place in Nazi Germany.
It was February 1943, one of the darker moments of the war. Since 1936, when marriages between Jews and non-Jews were forbidden by the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis had exercised considerable pressure to force those mixed couples who married before the laws to get divorced. Promotions were denied, jobs were terminated, rations were cut. Still, some couples remained faithful, and the government could not decide what to do with them. In the midst of a war that was looking less winnable every moment, should the government risk possible unrest by deporting those Jews still married to Aryans? They decided on a trial run, rounding up hundreds of Jewish men at their workplaces and holding them for deportation in a former office of the Jewish Community in the Rosenstrasse. Thousands of Jews had already been deported without protest.
This time was different. When the wives of the missing men found out where they were being held, they came, spontaneously, to the Rosenstrasse and insisted on having their husbands back. Having already endured considerable hardship and scorn for standing by their Jewish men, those women were as heedless of the Gestapo’s guns as they were of the icy wind. They remained at the site for more than a week. The government backed down; the men were released. And nothing bears witness to this little-known protest but the starkly simple clay-colored figures on the sculpture, acting out terror and triumph. The inscription on it reads:
THE POWER OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND THE POWER OF LOVE
OVERCAME THE VIOLENCE OF THE DICTATORSHIP
WOMEN STOOD HERE
DEFYING DEATH
GIVE US OUR MEN BACK
JEWISH MEN WERE FREE
I have been to this monument many times and taken many guests there, sometimes in tears. It’s often said that the tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were successful because their oppressors were civilized. The British and the Americans could be moved by the moral courage of their opponents; totalitarian governments simply kill them. The women of the Rosenstrasse tell another story: even in the darkest moments of the Third Reich, right could overcome wrong with no weapons at all. What is tragic is not so much that the story is hardly known, its heroines’ names unremembered, but that nobody followed their example.
What stopped others from doing so was not only the fear of Nazi terror but something else as well: the belief that heroic action is futile, and usually ends in death besides. This is the not-so-subtle message suggested by the many monuments to the Scholl siblings, Germany’s most famous resistance heroes. Hans and Sophie Scholl, students at Munich’s university, were arrested and guillotined for printing anti-Nazi leaflets. There is no contesting their courage, but the only consequence of their actions was to console later generations of Germans that not everyone capitulated to Nazi terror. Their story, like that of the other West German resistance hero, Count Stauffenberg, and his 1944 coconspirators, provides another and more sinister source of consolation: that resisting the Nazis achieved nothing but the deaths of those who tried. For millions of Germans who capitulated, that idea, however conscious, reinforced the idea that capitulation was the only rational thing to do. Unless you happened to have a taste for martyrdom.
Streets and schools named after the Scholl siblings dot the land, much as most Southern towns have a street called Martin Luther King Jr. The monument to the women of the Rosenstrasse, by contrast, inspires even as it provokes shame. The fact that their story could humiliate the millions of Germans who failed to follow their example may be part of the reason why several historians have recently tried to deconstruct the story, arguing that it wasn’t the women’s protest, but internal political considerations that led to the release of the men. The story remains under-researched, but no one disputes its basic truth: women dared protest, their men were freed, and all of them lived to tell the tale.
What about the memorial at the train station in leafy suburban Grünewald, from which fifty thousand Berlin Jews rode to their deaths? One track has been turned into a monument, forever closed to train traffic in acknowledgment of German railway complicity in their murder. Before the entrance is a large concrete wall studded with negative imprints of human bodies, symbolizing the absence of those who were deported. Absence is also the message of the Israeli artist Micha Ullmann’s memorial to the book burning that took place on Goebbels’s orders in 1933. You cannot see it until you are about to step on the glass panel that covers it. Underneath stand rows and rows of empty white bookshelves, just below the glass on the wide-open central square. Above them is a plaque quoting the nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine: That was just a prologue. Whoever burns books will eventually burn people. Another plaque states that Nazi students burned books on this spot, but the words are too sparse to convey what thousands of tourists passing by need to know: it wasn’t an unwashed, unlettered mob, but hundreds of well-off and well-read students, and their professors, who gleefully followed the Nazis’ first orders. There are photos showing their faces beam as they toss books into the flames right in front of the Humboldt University. We’d like to believe that illiterate masses are responsible for right-wing nationalism, but the numbers tell another story.
Most Berliners continue to insist that Germany face its own shame, even at the expense of other public goods. In 2001 the city of Berlin announced plans to build an underground parking lot in the vast space surrounding Ullmann’s monument. Berlin has good public transportation but a dearth of downtown parking space. Places for 458 cars, it was argued, would fill a genuine need. Since the underground garage wouldn’t displace the monument, but only fill up the empty space around it, this was an argument I accepted, especially since I’m wary of turning every reminder of terror into sacred space. But thousands of Berliners disagreed, and mounted a campaign against the parking lot, arguing that it would profane the monument. Their protests did not, in the end, prevent the garage, but it was delayed for several years, revealing the depth of citizens’ engagement in preserving these hallmarks of shame. It is hard to imagine similar engagement anywhere else.
The German government agency for political education produced a meticulous report in 2000 documenting every monument to Nazi crimes in the country. Berlin alone has 423, but some think there should be more. In particular, some people argue that the places where Nazi crimes were planned and carried out should be preserved and remembered. There are two such prominent places in Berlin. One is the House of the Wannsee Conference, a villa on the city’s outskirts where the Final Solution was prepared. You can take a ride in the elevator Eichmann used, see the room where the Nazi bosses drank cognac after lunch. At the entrance to the villa stand a pair of graying stone angels with sheepish faces. The other is the site of the Gestapo torture chambers, which have been partially unearthed in the city’s heart. Both sites include museums and educational centers. On the 2017 anniversary of Kristallnacht, in the lecture hall of the torture chambers, known as the Topography of Terror, I heard a discussion on the differences between monuments in the East and the West. On both sides, said the historians, there was little interest in the sites of the perpetrators. Why was Adolf Eichmann’s office torn down to make room for new buildings in the West? Shouldn’t there be at least a plaque on the spot? Why was the house of bureaucrats responsible for deportation left unmarked in the East? Doesn’t this show that both sides of the city were unwilling to confront Nazi crimes?
I think two sites of terror—one a fancy villa, the other a repellingly ugly series of dug-up ruined cellars—are enough. The phenomenon has given rise to dark tourism, a ghoulish curiosity to view all the places where humankind reveals its worst. There are many reasons people seek out sites of horror, and not all of them are morbid, but I don’t believe they should proliferate. Reminders of our susceptibility to evil are needed, but they need not be overdone. There’s a fine line between honoring victims and paying tribute to their murderers—even by paying too much attention to the latter. There is wisdom in the old Yiddish curse calling on God to give the cursed the worst of all fates: may his name and every memory of him be forgotten. It’s an unhappy paradox: every time you remember a victim of the Holocaust, you are keeping alive the memory of an SS officer. Like most paradoxes, this one cannot be resolved by force. We can neither decide to forget the victims for fear of perpetuating the memory of their torturers, nor to memorialize every single site where evil was done for fear of forgetting how it happened. Like most important questions, this can be settled only by judgment that takes every particular into account.
In 1966 Berlin’s mayor rejected the first proposal to turn the Wannsee villa into a memorial museum, fearing it could become “a macabre cult object.” He wanted to tear it down. Even back then, thousands of citizens insisted that it remain. If you’re going to tear down reminders of dark history, they argued, you’d have to tear down half of Berlin. Shortly after reunification, the monument and museum opened. It now serves thousands of German groups, who can research the Nazi history of their own professions, as well as visitors from overseas hoping to learn how to confront their own historical crimes. Delegations from Iraq, Chile, and the Congo were among those who visited the villa and met with its director in 2016. The House of the Wannsee Conference provides important services, as does the Topography of Terror, but a plaque on every building that served the Nazis would be a grim daily reminder of the worst of humanity. Far better to remember those who revealed the best of it, like the women of the Rosenstrasse.
Bryan Stevenson suggests that Southern buildings be renamed after white abolitionists and antilynching activists. He tells critics, “You should be proud of those white Southerners in Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama who argued in the 1850s that slavery was wrong. There were white Southerners in the 1920s who tried to stop lynchings, and you don’t know their names. The fact that we don’t know their names says everything we need to know.” If those names were commemorated, the country could turn from shame to pride. “We can actually claim a heritage rooted in courage, and defiance of doing what is easy, and preferring what is right. We can make that the norm we want to celebrate as our Southern history and heritage and culture.”
There were not many white Southerners who had that kind of courage; there were not many Germans who had it in Berlin. Some would argue that elevating them creates a false impression. In commemorating its resistance heroes, for example, East Germany seemed to suggest that most of its citizens had been antifascist fighters. Once again, it’s a line that only good judgment can draw. As Stevenson suggested, commemorating heroes is less a question of history than morality: these are the men and women who lived by the norms we choose to embrace. Heroes close the gap between the ought and the is. They show that it’s not only possible to use our freedom to stand against injustice, but that some folks have actually done so.
In addition to the other monuments in Berlin, there are the nearly ubiquitous stumbling stones—small brass plaques recording the names and the dates of birth and deportation of Jews, gays, Sinti, and Roma who lived in the houses before which they stand. When the artist Gunter Demnig began the project in 1995, there was quite a lot of opposition, and not only from the Aryans. Charlotte Knoblauch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, complained that the mini-monuments merely repeated the humiliations the victims suffered during the war, which she survived in hiding. “People murdered in the Holocaust deserve something better than a plaque in the dust and street filth.” After her statement, the city of Munich refused to permit the stones, a ban still being protested today. Yes, it is true: you can step on the stones, as the people they commemorate were stepped on in life and in death. Far more often, pedestrians step around them, many stopping to pause, read, and hold in their breath.
The stumbling stones document what larger memorials cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here. Is that what the city of Munich, serenely rich and self-confident, doesn’t want to face as it goes about its daily business? Did it justify its desire to be left undisturbed with deference to the opinion of one local Jew?
Whatever they may think in Munich, the stumbling stone project caught fire. It is now the largest decentralized monument in the world. As of 2018, almost seventy thousand stumbling stones have been laid across Europe, from Poland to Spain, with more applications arriving every day. Gunter Demnig has received a host of prizes, including Germany’s highest honor, the Bundesverdienstkreuz. Now seventy years old, Demnig still lays nearly all the stones himself, his longish gray hair spilling out beneath his trademark broad-brimmed hat. His foundation takes care of requests and logistics. Most of the requests come from different towns in Germany. They are usually made by the children and grandchildren of the murderers, not of the victims, though the victims’ relatives often come to watch the stones being laid. Those making the request must get permission from their local mayor to lay a stone in public space. Since so many German sidewalks are made of cobblestone, not much space is physically disturbed. Normally Demnig takes a cobblestone out and seals a stumbling stone in, but the political and psychic disturbance can be significant, as the controversy in Munich showed. That is, of course, the point: the stones are meant to disturb, make your head and heart stumble. In addition to obtaining municipal permission, applicants are expected to research the person being commemorated. Is the house before which the stone is to be laid the last place the deported chose to live freely, or was it in a ghetto to which she was banished? Is it possible to determine the exact cause and date of deportation? The word suicide is never used; Demnig insists on the phrase escape into death. Nor will he accept applications for stones commemorating mass murder: every victim should be remembered individually; every stone bears one name. The cost for laying a stone is 120 euros, a sum most people can afford.
Bryan Stevenson was profoundly affected by the stumbling stones. “They reminded me of the iconography of the Confederacy. You can’t go anywhere in the South without running into some sign or some street or some name that is designed to remind people of this era, which they take great pride in.” The stumbling stones do the same thing in reverse. Instead of pride, they are designed to evoke shame. “What I found interesting is that they have a kind of beauty and a kind of sobriety that makes it not inane. They are meant to disrupt your experience of space. For me, that was really, really powerful.” Elements of that disruption appear in Stevenson’s National Lynching Memorial. Located on the highest spot in Montgomery, the memorial consists of more than eight hundred columns, each representing a county in which the Equal Justice Initiative has documented a lynching. Where the victims’ names are known, they are recorded on the columns. Outside the memorial is an identical field of columns intended to be transient: EJI has invited each of the counties represented to come and take one home. If the iconography of lynching could become as deep a part of the Southern landscape as the iconography of the Confederacy, truth—and, after that, reconciliation—about the nation’s history would be served.
American slavery did not end in 1865. As Stevenson put it, the Thirteenth Amendment ended servitude, but slavery evolved. “We had a brilliant civil rights movement, but we didn’t win the narrative war.” The racial terrorism known as lynching was the most powerful instrument of white supremacy as late as the 1960s. James Meredith began his March Against Fear to combat the terror of lynching that permeated everyday life for black people, especially in the South. Despite two autobiographies, Meredith wrote that he could not put into words the sinking feeling in the stomach that came over every black American alone on a road. All this, he said, was the excess baggage in a black man’s mind, whether in Scarsdale, New York, or Philadelphia, Mississippi.13 The EJI has documented more than four thousand lynchings across 816 counties. Unlike the murder of Emmett Till, whose mother’s tenacity and courage ensured that it was remembered, most of those murders were never publicly commemorated. The memory of them, however, has successfully intimidated many African Americans to this day. (The movie Get Out is a brilliant sci-fi meditation on that fact.) The spots where the murders took place have lived on in community memory even when the names of the murdered have been forgotten. “That was the hanging tree,” a young white Mississippian may point out to his college sweetheart on her first visit home. Even before the larger memorial was finished, the EJI worked to mark those spots throughout the South. Sometimes they place markers documenting a murdered person’s story, a counterweight to the highway markers that document every damn skirmish in Confederate history. Even more strikingly, the EJI collects dirt. Aided by volunteers, they have shoveled earth from hundreds of lynching sites into tall glass jars displayed in the EJI’s office, marking them with a label naming the date and place of the lynching and, where possible, the name of the victim. It is harrowing to see how many jars are labeled UNKNOWN where a name ought to stand.
“For me,” said Stevenson, “the soil was important because I think the soil is the repository of all the suffering. We wanted it to create a tangible relationship to this legacy. In our narrative, the soil contains the sweat of people who were enslaved, the blood of people who were lynched, the tears of people who were humiliated by segregation.”
My only problem with the exhibit—it is very, very beautiful. One jar, one name, one place, one date: the soil within may be mixed with bits of straw or stone, but it stands by itself as a reminder of a crime never punished, a death mourned in silence and fear. Put them all together and you have a vision of a rainbow, if rainbows came in brown. Red-brown, green-brown, almost black, caramel, cinnamon umber and taupe, chocolate and copper, mahogany and chestnut. I was born among the red hills of Georgia, but I never knew that Southern dirt came in so many shades. Lined up to the ceiling by the hundreds, the jars compose a stunning still life. The beauty felt distracting.
Standing in the office of the Equal Justice Institute, I thought of Adorno’s declaration: writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. I disagree with Adorno, but this much is clear: if you’re memorializing massive crimes, you should be very, very careful not to aestheticize them. I mentioned my worry to Stevenson: “We’ve talked about the fetishization of violence. If we’re worried about that, shouldn’t the jars evoke more horror than grace?” The soil, he answered, was the site of blood, sweat, and tears. “But it still possesses the possibility of life.”
The memorial itself merits the overused word awesome. While the starkly modern slabs are reminiscent of the Holocaust Memorial, the monument is constructed so that the slabs evoke hangings as the visitor descends. They are made of rusting metal that drips red when it rains, evoking blood but not insisting on it. Maybe Stevenson has solved Adorno’s problem.
In a fine and subtle essay, Jan Philipp Reemtsma asked about the purpose of such monuments.14 It cannot be remembering for its own sake, for both remembering and forgetting are human activities that are neither good nor bad in themselves. “The historical past,” wrote Todorov, “like the natural order, has no intrinsic meaning, and by itself it produces no values at all.” The injunction to “Never forget!” should thus be unpacked. Reemtsma described the purpose of traditional war memorialization: “to send future generations into battle with a light heart, as is claimed for the fallen hero, or at least to assure them they will be remembered too.”15 But that cannot be the purpose of memorializing concentration camps. They are, first, instruments of history against those who seek to deny it. By preserving the space in which they took place, they document in order to prove to any would-be Holocaust denier that these crimes are undeniable. This was particularly important during the first years of the Federal Republic, where concerted resistance had to be overcome in order to preserve and document Dachau, the first of such memorials in the West. But proof, wrote Reemtsma, is no longer needed. The only people left unconvinced by the facts today are those whom no fact could convince.
Nor can the purpose of these spaces be hopes for conversion. In the light of rising right-wing nationalism, as well as Muslim anti-Semitism, some German politicians have proposed that visits to concentration camps, often a part of high school curricula, should be made mandatory. But why should the site of a concentration camp produce an epiphany? There is little reason to suppose that this happens, and some reason to suspect the opposite. “Why wouldn’t someone who enjoys tormenting other people find such spaces attractive?” asked Reemtsma.
No visit to a concentration camp ensures you will identify with the victims rather than the perpetrators. Something about these spaces is always abstract, and anyhow, you know beforehand which side you’re on. Peter Eisenman, the architect who created the Holocaust Memorial, once spoke of his hopes for it. “If a Japanese tourist who knows nothing about the Holocaust comes in fifty years, he’ll feel something when he goes into the monument. Maybe he feels what it’s like to go into a gas chamber.” Eisenman’s hopes were painfully immodest. Even if said tourist weren’t distracted by hawkers and selfies, nothing about a monument could evoke the terror and despair of someone about to face a wretched death. The same is true of the memorialized concentration camps themselves. They cannot—nor are they meant to—put us in the place of those who toiled and died there. At most, the camps evoke their shadows, and remind us that our lives are not like theirs at all.
And yet, Reemtsma wrote, the concentration camps are sacred spaces. This is partly because they are always also graveyards, and human beings learn early to show respect to their dead. Some people cover their heads in a cemetery; everyone knows not to shout. Is it a feeling of reverence? A hint of superstition? Reemtsma, a resolute atheist, suggested that sacrality is something else: “A sacred space is not our object, we are its object. It doesn’t have to justify its existence to us; we have to justify our ways of living before it.”16 The tendency to turn the Holocaust into a sacred religion is one I’ve criticized elsewhere, and I am chary of using religious language to describe its sites. I believe reverence should be saved for goodness and glory. So I wasn’t prepared for what hit me one cold day in 2017, when I visited Dachau for the first time in thirty-five years.
Back then I’d been a graduate student on a government fellowship. It was my first trip to Germany, and I did what most Jews do. I visited the nearest concentration camp. I remember trying hard to feel moved, or shaken, or whatever combination of emotions seemed appropriate, and failing entirely. Later I chafed at the tenacity of Jewish tourists who view Europe as a vast Jewish graveyard, dutifully checking off death sites and noticing little else. Still, it seemed foolish to finish this book without visiting one again.
Though I didn’t think there would be anything I needed to learn at Dachau, a map in the museum taught me something important. I knew that most large concentration camps had subsidiary camps to hold the overflowing numbers of prisoners as the regime wore on. I just didn’t know how many there were, nor how widely they were sprinkled all over the country. The names of the large camps are burned into our brains, but whoever heard of Gmund? Utting? Gablingen? Saulgau? All these small towns, and many, many more, held small camp outposts where political prisoners, Jews, and later Russian POWs were worked and usually tormented to death. The postwar German claim that “we didn’t know what they were doing in our name” might just barely work for Poland, but the subsidiary camps were right next door in blissful, bucolic Bavaria. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to notice.
My visit to Dachau was meant to be a meta-visit. I rented an audio guide from the friendly curly-haired youth at the desk. For half an hour I tried to take meta-notes: What kind of people come to this site, and how? The schoolchildren were well behaved; the middle-aged Turkish couple, she in a hijab, were quietly holding hands; the Latin American family was ignoring the sign before the auditorium warning that the film is unsuitable for children under the age of twelve. The film is relentless, like the rest of the large museum. There are dimly lit panels devoted to each group of prisoners. There are examples of the haunting art they made: an ink drawing of a nighttime roll call, a watercolor of a hanging. Mostly there are photos that spare no detail. Paint peels from the walls where the SS once stripped prisoners of the last of their possessions, leaving them naked to walk to the bathhouse. Once you’ve withstood the museum, you can walk across the grounds where roll calls were held and enter a reconstructed barracks. You can also walk farther to enter the crematorium. Almost one million visitors view the site each year.
After a few minutes I put my notebook in my backpack and turned off the audio guide. I wanted to be alone with my own voice, or voicelessness. The space took me over. It wasn’t about learning, even less about analyzing; for a couple of hours I was no wiser than anyone else. As the sun began to set, the glimmer of pink sky seemed to reproach the gray of the pebbles, the gray of the walls, the iron of the monuments erected to honor all the dead. Tears filled my eyes. At a steel cube containing the ashes of unknown prisoners, I said Kaddish. Did I say it? It welled up out of me, the way the Shema did as I stood in the Jewish monument, dark but for the word YIZKOR—remember—engraved at the entrance in Hebrew, and a thin ray of sunlight that forced itself through a hole in the ceiling. I thought I knew, and I knew quite a lot. I’d written a book about modern evil from Lisbon to Auschwitz. Yet there was something that had been absent—whatever it was that now made me nauseated, staring at all those pictures in the midst of all that ground.
The feeling of utter powerlessness in that vast, empty space didn’t last long. It began to fade in the bookshop, where the gray-haired saleswoman ringing up my purchase commented on a writer we both loved. This was, for me, familiar ground: talking about books, weighing and praising. It didn’t matter that the books in question were written by Ruth Kluger, who entered Auschwitz at the age of twelve. I was back in my normal world, doing what I know how to do.
Yet the memory of emotion remained after the emotion itself had faded. I understood what Reemtsma meant about sacred space. We are its object, not the other way around. These monuments of horror are absolutely necessary. One shouldn’t go to many, and certainly not often; that would dull their force. But without them, all the reading and studying in the world could be lifeless and lame.
Reemtsma’s essay acknowledged that only a minority is interested in such memorials, only a minority fought to have them erected and thinks about their meaning and their future. “But the minority made sure that its interests prevailed. That is what counts.” He concluded:
It is not a matter of memory, but of consciousness of danger that we know since we’ve known it was an illusion to believe that civilization is irreversible. The danger will always remain pressing. And it is a matter of something I will call shame. A shame that, detached from the question of guilt, seizes anyone who lets themselves be seized. To waken and practice consciousness and shame—that is the reason for these monuments.17
Let us stop for a moment to think about distance. Once, history was a matter of consolation or pride: just see how far we’ve come from barbarism. Now it’s a matter of warning and shame. The modern subject of history evolved as a substitute for Providence. Since language began, peoples have recorded their histories in everything from songs to tax records, but the systematic study of history began with the process of secularization. The idea of Providence was the idea that the problem of evil is no problem at all, for an unseen and all-seeing God will turn the wheels of fortune so that every wrong is eventually righted, every righteousness rewarded. That idea was mortally wounded by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and it could not be revived.18 By the end of the eighteenth century, Kant knew that this promise of justice could not be kept by theology, so he set history in its place. His critical philosophy allows us to believe that the human race may be progressing to a better state. If we cannot believe this much, we will never maintain the fortitude we need in order to make it true. That’s why Kant calls this belief rational faith.
Hence history was studied for signs of progress within it. The discipline flourished in the nineteenth-century Prussian Academy, where faith in history as an exact science was so unshaking that it gave historians lavish funding that their colleagues in natural science envied at the time.19 As Nietzsche later summarized, “It put history in the place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the one sovereign: inasmuch as it is the ‘idea realizing itself,’ ‘the dialectic of the spirit of the nations,’ and ‘the tribunal of the world.’”20 The idea must have encouraged the empirical toilers: all those hours in the archives were not devoted simply to finding information, but to proving we live in the best of all possible worlds.
There was a notable jump from Kant to Hegel, who argued that history always tends toward justice and freedom.21 Kant believed that progress is possible. Hegel and his student Marx believed that progress is necessary. The twentieth century left little room for belief in the latter, notwithstanding temporary Hegelian outbursts like those of Francis Fukuyama. One consequence was a turn from studies of history to studies of memory. Memory makes no claim to meaning beyond itself. Those who insist on the importance of preserving memory are, often enough, deliberately anti-messianic. We should, they believe, preserve historical memory not as source of hope or comfort, but as warning. This is how fragile our civilization can be.
“You’re meeting me in my post-optimistic phase,” said Volkhard Knigge, longtime director of the Buchenwald Memorial. I had written to ask for an interview, and he offered me something better. Would I care to have his assistant show me around the camp and its new exhibit, then meet him for dinner in Weimar? The contrast is legendary. Weimar was the center of the German Enlightenment, where Goethe was a state functionary and Schiller built a theater; later it was the home of the Bauhaus, and Germany’s first republic. The town has been beautifully restored. You can walk through cobblestone streets past graceful, gaily painted houses and think about the best Germany ever had to offer. Goethe’s house, now a national museum, provides a surprisingly poignant picture of the great man’s life. In the Anna Amalia Library, founded in 1691, the stunning rococo hall permits a glance into the collection of nearly a million works, many of them priceless.
Five miles down the road is the site of Germany’s most central concentration camp. The citizens of Weimar had no objection when the SS announced its plan to build a huge concentration camp in the neighborhood; they were happy to cheer Hitler on his frequent visits. But they did object to the camp being named Ettersberg, for the wood was well known as a place where Goethe loved to walk, and somehow that was too much for the denizens of the town that Germany’s greatest literary hero made famous. Though every other concentration camp was named after its location, the SS reacted quickly by inventing another name: Buchenwald. Now Weimar and Buchenwald are eternally linked, the best and the worst of German history.
If Weimar and Buchenwald are emblems of German tradition, the Hotel Elephant is its quintessence. Originally built in 1696 on Weimar’s central square, it has housed most every luminary of German culture. Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder were regulars; Liszt and Wagner later stayed there. Thomas Mann set a novel in it, and the hotel hosted foreign guests from Leo Tolstoy to Patti Smith.
Volkhard Knigge told me what few tourist guides will: the hotel was also Hitler’s favorite. He stayed there thirty-five times and ordered it renovated from top to bottom in 1937. Apparently the order to build the most modern hotel in Europe was occasioned by his annoyance at having to walk down the hall to the toilet. By the time the renovations were done, the sign of an elephant over the front door had been replaced by a Prussian eagle, and a special balcony had been built so the Führer could greet the crowds assembled on the square. “In the 1990s, people regularly asked to stay in the Hitler suite,” Knigge told me, “and the new management recognized it as a problem. So in 1997 we organized a concert on the square by Udo Lindenberg, and we had him stay in Hitler’s suite—which we renamed the Udo Lindenberg suite.” The provocative rock star must have enjoyed chasing out the ghosts. Not long after that was the fifty-fifth anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation. “We invited all the survivors and filled the hotel; the staff did everything they possibly could for them. Many survivors are very poor, especially those from Eastern Europe. Some of them have nothing. So a week in a luxury hotel was—wonderful. We did it again for the seventieth anniversary.”
“A small culinary start to your evening,” said our waiter. “This is a sesame cracker with chive cream and trout caviar. On the spoon is salmon tartar. And in the glass is potato foam soup topped with Parmesan risotto.” There was already a bottle of Champagne next to the table. Knigge is a frequent and honored guest in the Michelin-starred restaurant.
I was glad to know that the remaining Buchenwald survivors had enjoyed a whole week of this, but I wasn’t sure how to navigate one evening. Knigge’s assistant, Dr. Michael Löffelsender, had just given me a four-hour tour of the camp. When I descended from the bus that took me to Buchenwald from the Weimar train station, the fog was so dense it was hard to make out anything at all. That seemed fitting. The new exhibit, opened in 2016, is quite different from that of Dachau; it contains little gore. There are portraits of inmates who survived and inmates who didn’t. Their stories endure. There are strikingly lit collections of prison uniforms, tin bowls and ladles that capture the hunger better than photographs of starving prisoners. There is evidence of the lengths they went to preserve shreds of dignity through music and art. There is even an exhibit devoted to Schiller’s furniture. As the air raids drew closer, the furniture was moved from Weimar to Buchenwald, where prisoners built copies to place in the Schiller museum while the originals were safely stored in the camp. The Nazis knew that no Allied air raid had targeted a concentration camp, so they could be sure the relics of German high culture would be safe there.
That exhibit is one of several that document the museum’s current focus: to show that Nazism emerged in the middle of Germany, and Germany in all its glory, not on its margins. At the entrance to the museum is an old film clip of happy blond children in an amusement park not far from the place where the camp was being built. Next to the film are photos of Hitler greeting the masses from the balcony of the Hotel Elephant, along with photos of those masses filling up Weimar’s central square with their cries. Lieber Führer, komm heraus, aus dem Elefantenhaus. Lieber Führer, bitte bitte, lenk auf den Balkon die Schritte.—Dear Führer, please come out to the balcony so we can see you! Also in the museum is a 1945 letter from Weimar city dignitaries written to the American command.
Your news media suggests that the residents of Weimar had knowledge of the cruelties at Buchenwald and kept silent, so now they are morally complicit … The mayor of this city and the other signatories of this letter appeal to the world’s sense of justice when we ask you to remove this undeserved stain from the great old cultural capital Weimar.22
Everything in the museum is designed to refute that letter.
“An exhibit that says ‘suffering is suffering’ is not enough,” says Knigge. “Not unless you ask who wanted it. How did they justify it? How did they realize it? Why was there so little resistance?” Knigge says that’s one reason he’s become skeptical about German working-off-the-past.
“The real question,” said Knigge, “is not ‘What would I have done in ’42, ’43, ’44?’ Our memories are narrowed by the Holocaust, which shields us from the history of its causes. The real question is ‘What would I have done in ’32 or ’33?’ Then it’s a question about courage, but not a matter of life and death. And it’s not one you can answer by saying there was no chance for effective resistance.”
There were plenty of chances. What the Buchenwald exhibit shows: the vast majority of comfortable, cultivated citizens of Weimar had no desire to take them. They were perfectly happy to have on their outskirts a camp that eventually held a quarter of a million inmates. Local companies used their slave labor; Hitler Youth groups took tours. The only objection Weimar made was to the idea that the camp’s name be associated with its beloved Goethe.
There is something profoundly eerie about that objection. In making it, the townspeople implicitly acknowledged that the existence of the camp would defile something. Their moral compass was partly intact. Did they love Goethe—a.k.a. classical German culture—so much that they’d rather sully their name than his? As the Weimar mayor’s postwar plea to the American command shows, they never thought that far; when the war was all over, they simply denied what they’d known. Arendt was right to argue that much evil results from sheer thoughtlessness. The kernel of moral care that made the citizens of Weimar want to keep Goethe’s ghost clean suggests that most of us could think our actions through if we tried.
I share Knigge’s view that what’s important for the future is to think about the causes of evil, not to dwell on its results. “Obama just broke an American taboo,” I said. “Because Nazi in America just means the devil incarnate.” If that were the case, there’d be no need to think about causes. In December 2017, without mentioning his successor’s name, Obama said,
We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly. That’s what happened in Germany in the 1930s, which, despite the democracy of the Weimar Republic and centuries of high-level cultural and scientific achievements, Adolf Hitler rose to dominate. Sixty million people died, so, you’ve got to pay attention. And vote.23
“Which is why,” I added, we need to acknowledge our history in America.”
“I speak with people from authoritarian societies all the time,” said Knigge. “From South America and Africa and Eastern Europe. I understand why they find German working-off-the-past a reason for hope. Barack Obama grasped it immediately. He came to Buchenwald shortly after his speech in Cairo. There was a state visit with all the protocol, and Chancellor Merkel was not particularly enthusiastic; she would have preferred to have him longer in Dresden. So he had breakfast with her in Dresden and spent most of his time here, and he broke protocol and stayed much longer than expected. There was a moment when we were alone in the crematorium, and he was looking at a large photo of corpses taken just after liberation. He asked me, ‘What would that mean for a slavery museum in America?’”
“How did you answer him?” I asked.
“I confirmed that his question was the right one,” said Knigge. “He had a speech already prepared, but he threw it away and improvised. He didn’t say And tomorrow I’m going back to lay the foundation stone for a slavery museum.”
“He couldn’t have done that if he’d wanted to.”
“He couldn’t. And he didn’t say And now I’m building a museum to commemorate the massacres of Native Americans. But he understood the core of Germany’s work to create this self-critical look at our history. Older forms of memory focused either on celebrating a nation’s own heroes or mourning its own victims. We’ve developed a different paradigm that, when it’s serious, asks about the perpetrators and their motives and the social conditions around them. That all comes from the awareness that neither victims nor heroes fall straight from heaven. Of course people have the freedom to make moral decisions. But we have to understand the structures within which they do so.”
“I still don’t understand why you’re post-optimistic.”
“Because this model of self-critical memory is coming under pressure from so many sides.”
Knigge helped create that model. He never set out to be the director of Buchenwald. He was raised in a West German Pietist family—“authoritarian Protestantism, but with a certain fundamentalist resilience against the worst of Nazism.” His father was drafted in 1943. Had the war continued, he would probably have had a major Nazi career, but fortunately, he was stationed in Paris. “My Francophilia is a reaction. For my father and grandfather, the French were the eternal enemy. They were filthy, erotically overheated—”
“Not the Russians?”
“Oh, the Russians in any case. But the French as well. My father spent half a year with his garrison in Paris until the city was liberated. He didn’t mind shooting, but it wasn’t war, it was Paris.” The catastrophe, for those like Knigge’s father, came afterward. After the Ardennes offensive, the German troops had to flee all the way through Germany before the eyes of their countryfolk. For his generation, the shame was unbearable. Again, Knigge’s father was lucky; he landed, unwounded, in an American POW camp. Still, the psychological damage was undeniable. That generation was too young to have any responsibility for the Nazis but old enough to be entirely dominated by them. If you started school when Hitler came to power, you had no intellectual resources to resist the indoctrination that permeated the educational system, the youth groups, the culture as a whole. All those were directed toward cultivating troops of fanatical Nazis. When 1945 brought total defeat, what could you possibly say?
The silence broke with the first wave of teachers born after ’45. “Suddenly the air was fresher,” said Knigge. “You could breathe. We discovered film and theater and books. We got words for what we experienced—not this sticky silence.” He decided to study psychoanalysis, which was a further revelation. “I’ll never forget my first supervision. That’s when I realized: For heaven’s sake! There are words for emotions. You can express what you feel inside and be better for it.”
Whatever reserve German families may have shown before the war was infinitely compounded after ’45. Knigge’s desire to study psychoanalysis was politically motivated. “To be a doctor in this society means you have to study history. I suppose I was euphoric, a little naïve, but the combination gave me a lot. My question was always: How does history stalk the subject? How does large, world-shaking history affect small individual biographies?” He went to Paris to study Lacanian analysis but found it “dreadful.” When he returned to Germany, he became engaged in the struggle that was just beginning: to recognize and restore the sites of Nazi terror.
In 1990, West Germany had only a few pathetic monuments. Sites were hidden behind overgrown weeds; many had become trash dumps. “Those of us who were seeking were called unpatriotic nest foulers,” said Knigge. “All that has been erased through the state-sponsored commemorations we fought for, but at the time, no one was interested in the camps. They were crime scenes in the middle of society.”
“Would you like the wine menu, Herr Knigge? Or shall the sommelier choose for you? He understands your taste.”
“I’ll take the menu. Red or white?” Knigge asked me.
“Red, in this weather.” The fog in Weimar was not as thick as it was in Buchenwald, but the night was cold and clammy.
When Knigge looks back at milestones of postwar German history, he begins with Adenauer’s exchange: reparations were not called reparations, but they were the price for acceptance into the Western community, and the price was relatively cheap. “At the time, Greece was demanding reparations too, and the Foreign Office considered the matter quite coolly. We have trade relations with the Greeks: tobacco, grapes, a few other things. Israel was different, with enormous symbolic character.” Reparations were paid in exchange for world recognition and the opportunity to keep silent about the quantity of Nazis, and Nazi thinking, that permeated the Federal Republic. What was left of Christian and left-liberal tradition moved some to reflect about guilt, but most of the population did not. Artists and intellectuals insisted on confronting the nation’s crimes. “As a historian, one must say these were all processes that made the accusations irrefutable. And Weizsäcker’s speech was liberating. Suddenly we weren’t just nest foulers, we had support from the government itself.”
But the decisive event, according to Knigge, was reunification. Suddenly the Federal Republic had to do something with the mass of monuments left in what had been the German Democratic Republic. “Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück. And however they were politically instrumentalized, whatever historical inaccuracies they contained, they were damned big.” In 1990 Dachau had a staff of five. Buchenwald, in the East, had more than a hundred employees, with an archive and a library and a structure, and unlike the institutions in the West, it had all been financed by the state. Suddenly the Federal Republic was helpless. They knew they had to do something with those sites, and they had no idea what. “That’s where I came in,” said Knigge. “There was a vacuum and a crisis. West Germany had no experience with concentration camp memorials. They saw that the questions were politically charged and decided to let academics solve the problems. To exaggerate only slightly: the politicians wanted the historians to navigate the minefields, let them burn their fingers. When the historians had removed the mines, the politicians could take over again.”
Knigge is soft-spoken and determined—above all, determined to find truth. The demand to memorialize the Holocaust came from movements within civil society, of which he was a part. But it was the center-right chancellor Helmut Kohl who turned the demand into a political program. Before him, the Christian Democratic Union saw every demand to commemorate the Holocaust as a left-wing political threat. Yet “without Kohl there would be no national memorials. That’s the bitter truth, and his own party attacked him for it. He wasn’t particularly interested in concentration camp sites; he was focused on the national Holocaust monument in Berlin. But he got it. He was an opportunist, but not a cynic; he wanted the next generation’s blessing.” In the negotiations leading up to reunification, Kohl agreed to the East German demand that Buchenwald be recognized as a monument of national significance. If Knigge is right, it’s not unlike Lyndon Johnson’s role in the civil rights movement. He may have begun his life as a Texas racist, and his behavior at the 1964 Democratic Convention undermined the painfully hard work of civil rights workers in the field. His insistence on seating the all-white delegation of Mississippi Democrats instead of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, whose members had risked their lives to vote, was a major blow to the activists. But they pushed him to move toward the right side of history, to insist on civil rights legislation that finally broke the back of legal segregation. You never know beforehand who’s going to get things done.
Knigge was the seventh director of Buchenwald within four years. One GDR-appointed director resigned of her own accord when it became clear she’d been close to Margot Honecker, wife of the East German party leader. Other directors were simply overwhelmed by the political chaos surrounding their task: to overhaul the museum so that it was historically accurate and politically neutral, untainted by Eastern or Western agendas. Knigge himself was attacked by all sides. “The communist press headline was ‘Adenauer’s Grandchildren, Under the Leadership of Herr Knigge, Are Shredding Our Antifacism’. The right-wing press wrote ‘West German leftist is preserving the national monument of the GDR, and with it the GDR itself.’ I could only say ‘Sorry, I cannot be both.’”
Volkhard Knigge was bound to antagonize both sides, for part of his task in reconstructing the museum was to deconstruct two potent political myths. East Germany memorialized Buchenwald as the center of communist resistance. And there was a communist underground in Buchenwald, but it was far too small to create the rebellion East Germans imagined. “One hundred guns and a dozen hand grenades? Against a thousand SS men, it would have been suicide.” By April 1945 the SS was in panic, for they knew American armies were approaching. They’d been given orders to evacuate or even liquidate the camp, but the camp commandant wavered, sending some prisoners on a death march, leaving others alone. The SS finally fled, leaving a power vacuum that the communist camp organization filled. American troops came in almost by accident. “Unfortunately, it was never a strategic or tactical goal to liberate the camps. The troops did it if they happened to be there. That contributed to the communist legend.” But what the GDR depicted as a heroic, well-organized rebellion was in fact the resistance takeover of an unguarded camp, with some American help. Undermining the myth that the camp liberated itself was part of Knigge’s job.
The other myth came from the right. It was based on one fact: after Buchenwald was abandoned by the Nazis, it was used as a prison camp by the Soviets. From 1945 to 1950 some twenty-eight thousand Germans were imprisoned there. One-quarter of them died from hunger and disease. The fact of this camp leads many to insist on the equivalence of two totalitarian systems. Those making that claim leave out just one thing: those initially imprisoned in the camp were Nazi functionaries. Not the really big functionaries, who were hiding or imprisoned elsewhere. Under Soviet occupation, Buchenwald held the smaller cogs who kept the Nazi machine turning: the Blockwart, who watched every neighbor on the block to see who failed to hang her flag properly or who might be hiding a Jew; the lower echelons of editors who kept the propaganda running. “They were morally guilty,” said Knigge. “Absolutely awful people. But they didn’t kill anybody, so legally—it’s a problem. Then there was the question of luck: one Nazi Blockwart might be sitting in Buchenwald while others were happily living their lives. Contingency played a big role; the Soviets weren’t interested in examining individual guilt.” The overwhelming majority of postwar prisoners had a Nazi past, but not every one.
Still, many today insist on equating the camps, among them the former German president Joachim Gauck, whose father, an early and committed Nazi, was interned by the Soviets. When Gauck made a state visit to Buchenwald, Knigge told me, they had to have the old debate all over again because Gauck wanted to have the same ceremony for those imprisoned by the Nazis and those imprisoned by the Soviets. Buchenwald was to be a central place for revitalizing Cold War ideology. “For that you’d have to have a concentration camp without communists and a Soviet camp without Nazis, and we refused to offer either,” said Knigge. “The West legend holds that all those interned in the Soviet camp were democratic opponents of communism. The East legend holds that they were all major Nazi war criminals. It turns out that neither is true.”
“Do you see the talk of two German dictatorships as a form of exoneration for the Nazis?”
“I do, which is one reason for my skepticism about German memorial culture. Enlightenment is a tough business.”
Another reason for his skepticism is the pedagogical model used in most Holocaust education. “Students are told to imagine they were a German captain ordered to shoot Jews and then asked Would you do it or not? It’s a ridiculous exercise because you get only socially acceptable answers. Even neo-Nazis know what to say. And it’s ridiculous because it involves no discussion of the framework in which the Nazis developed: the breaking of the social constitution, the destruction of individual rights, and so on. All you get are the crude clichés: oh, it was horrible. And it was horrible, but that’s not going to get young people thinking. Simple remembering is empty.”
When Knigge works with youth groups, he asks them to be detectives. “I don’t demand that they break out in tears or identify with the victims. I ask them, as detectives, to figure out why it happened. We have objects and witnesses, just like in ordinary crimes, and I ask them to sift through the material evidence and ask why. And for the first time—after all the moralizing Never agains! and Oh how awfuls!—for the first time, they pay attention.”
It doesn’t work with everyone. In most guidebooks, Buchenwald is now a must-see stop on a trail. Some of those who come are what Knigge calls Horror-Disneyland tourists. There are also committed Nazis who come to Buchenwald because they view it as a model. They are anti-Semitic, but they know that’s unacceptable, so they talk instead about Muslims. And they’d like to round them up and gas them all.
“You can work with Holocaust deniers, because that’s a matter of truth and lies. You can take them into the archive and show them documents. It’s almost impossible to work with neo-Nazis. Often, they have very exact knowledge of the Holocaust. But in order to find something evil or inhuman, you have to begin with moral assumptions that knowledge can only strengthen. You can tie knowledge to a moral framework. But for hard-core neo-Nazis, I cannot assume that an ethical a priori exists.”
“What do you do?”
“Call the police.”
Knigge has tried to work with the hard core. There was a group of six or seven youths, all of them underprivileged high school dropouts, already under the care of social workers. In the day he spent with them in Buchenwald they all repeated Nazi claims. Yeah, it was war and the prisoners were enemies. It may not have been pretty, but there was no alternative. “At some point I was desperate and thought there must be a way to shake them up. So I said, ‘Look, we see things differently, but I just want to understand you. What would you get from a society like the one you prefer? What would you gain?’ Their answer was astonishing. They didn’t think they’d be rich or powerful. They knew they’d still be at the bottom of the heap. But they said they’d have more dignity, simply for belonging to a higher race.”
Longer-term programs might permit a breakthrough, but the people they’re intended to change are usually disinclined to come. Nor does Knigge have the funding that long-term education would require. He has a hostel with seventy beds and seminar rooms for reaching those young people who are uncertain, not yet committed to the radical right, but it’s hard to find the resources that would make such programs work. “As in any museum, politicians look at quantitative results: How many people walked through the door this year? Sometimes I sound cynical and tell them it doesn’t take rocket science to drive up the numbers. All we’d have to do is stage burnings at the crematoria every Thursday evening. Someone always winces. I’m afraid there may come a day when nobody winces and somebody asks Why not? They often ask why I don’t reconstruct the barracks, with holograms. It’s a purely sentimental, historically shallow commemoration. And it drives young people away in droves.”
Still, I pressed, didn’t he think something has been achieved by all the work he and others have done?
“We need a double view. Every democracy has a right to ask about its successes. Here that means, what have we understood, what have we worked off? But we also need to ask, what has persisted? How many racist structures still survive? That was Adorno’s question. He wasn’t asking us to remember the past; memory by itself has nothing to do with enlightenment. He was asking us to confront the past. That’s different.”
“In Adorno’s day, a great deal of Nazi thinking still survived.”
“It survives today as well. There’s much to do before we can pat ourselves on the shoulder.”
“I’ve never met a German who thinks she can pat herself on the shoulder.”
“Not exactly. But the young people think the work is all done. And I meet many people who still seek pseudo-anthropological explanations. Man is evil, that’s just how it is.”
“What do you tell them?”
“I remind them of Freud, who said human beings are neither good nor evil. They can be formed.”
“How do they know to put stones?” I asked Leroy Clemons, the bighearted, tough-minded alderman of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and president of the NAACP in Neshoba County, long infamous as one of the meanest, most racist places in the state.
Christians lay flowers at monuments and gravesites; the day I went to Dachau, three huge wreaths of still-fresh roses lay under the main memorial. Jews lay small stones, and I doubted there was a Jew in all of Neshoba County. I was standing in front of Mount Zion Church, just outside Philadelphia, pierced by a sharp sense of connection and loss. Carved into marble were the words THIS MEMORIAL IS PRAYERFULLY AND PROUDLY DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES CHANEY, ANDREW GOODMAN AND MICHAEL SCHWERNER, WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE STRUGGLE TO OBTAIN HUMAN RIGHTS FOR ALL PEOPLE.
“I do a tremendous number of groups every year from all over the world, so a lot of Jewish groups too,” answered Leroy. “They come in big numbers, and they put the rocks down pretty much as soon as they come in.”
As cochair of the Philadelphia Coalition, he helped bring Edgar Ray Killen to trial in 2005. Killen was the Klansman who organized the deaths of the three civil rights workers, and for forty-one years thereafter he lived his life undisturbed—because he was also a preacher, and no jury in Mississippi would convict a man of God. The memorial to Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner resembles a tombstone, as does a similar one on the other side of the church. But no bodies are buried beneath them. The families of the murdered men wanted them buried together. In 1964 this was illegal, for Chaney was black, and Goodman and Schwerner were white, and in Mississippi even the graveyards were segregated.
It’s a very long way from Buchenwald to Neshoba County, and some readers will balk at any connection between the two. Thousands of people died in Buchenwald, and in Neshoba there were only three. But Jewish tradition compares saving a life to saving the world, and oh what lives those three men could have led. Their deaths became symbolic, for better and worse. Like more massive murders, these were organized and carried out by the state where the Klan, the police, the sheriff’s departments, and highway patrol officers were often one and the same. I kicked through the dirt in search of a suitable stone to place with the others, glad to know I wasn’t the only Jew to whom Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been heroes for longer than I could remember.
They were killed during Freedom Summer, the project I’d been too young to join. All I could do was admire a distant cousin from Chicago who’d spent a night at our home in Atlanta on his way to the heart of the iceberg, as Bob Moses called Mississippi. Freedom Summer was Moses’s brainchild. Convinced that desegregating the ballot boxes was more important than desegregating lunch counters, Moses had launched a drive to register black Mississippians to vote. Not only during Reconstruction but for some time afterward African Americans in Mississippi had voted in large numbers and even held a variety of public offices. The Jim Crow laws put in place around the turn of the century dismantled every civil right that had been gained in much of the South.24 Moses and his colleagues at SNCC had worked for several years to restore them. They had little success. Blacks who attended SNCC Freedom Schools, whose first order of business was teaching eligible citizens to pass the draconian voter registration tests, were hounded, beaten, and in several cases murdered. “I didn’t know it was against the law to kill a black man,” said one young white man from Neshoba. “I learned that when I joined the army. When they told me, I thought they were joking.”25 Even the murderers in widely publicized cases, such as that of Emmett Till or Medgar Evers, were embraced by their own communities, who manned the juries that declared them innocent. Should SNCC continue a voter registration drive whose main result, until then, had only been an increase in the terror and torture of black bodies?
Freedom Summer was to be a solution. Mississippians might kill black people with impunity and without national attention, but what if a battalion of white people from the North came down to help register voters? The Ku Klux Klan might harass them, but surely they’d hesitate to kill them, and their presence would draw the nation’s attention to the Mississippi battles it was inclined to ignore. Some SNCC members worried that the proposal could lead to a white takeover of an African American–led struggle. Others worried about the ethics of deliberately putting young people in harm’s way. But the situation in Mississippi was growing desperate, and it wasn’t hard to find one thousand idealistic students willing to go.26 Though they were trained in the techniques of nonviolent activism, most of Mississippi viewed them as an invading army, not unlike the Union soldiers who’d descended on the state a century earlier.
Twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman from New York City was one of them. Mickey Schwerner, a twenty-four-year-old social worker, had come to Mississippi from New York with his wife, Rita, half a year earlier; they were the first full-time white civil rights workers in the state. James Chaney was a talented twenty-one-year-old local activist who had worked with Schwerner—“like Siamese twins.”27 Chaney and Schwerner had visited the Mount Zion Church several times in the hopes of persuading the black congregation to house a new Freedom School in Neshoba County, where no blacks had voted for years. In their half year in Mississippi, the Schwerners’ work had been bold enough to attract considerable Klan attention. Plans to kill Mickey, whom Mississippians called Goatee because of his unfamiliar beard, had been brewing since April. In mid-June, the KKK saw a chance to carry them out.
They noticed a meeting at Mount Zion Church that they considered suspicious. This is what it looked like from the perspective of Philadelphia Coalition member Jimmie Jewel McDonald, who was just seventeen on June 16, 1964: “There was a collection meeting, and you would be at church forever, counting your little pennies, and you would want to get out and see your boyfriend under the tree someplace.” Jewel, as she’s called, told me she would have been at that meeting had she not been babysitting her niece. Jewel’s mother and brother went to church—and came back beaten bloody, along with two other congregants. “Where are the white people?” the Klan members shouted while beating Jewel’s brother with brass knuckles. They were looking for Schwerner, whom they knew had visited the church, but Jewel’s brother didn’t know who they were talking about.
“Well, I can tell you just by instinct,” said Leroy. “You jump on a black woman’s child, you gonna have to whip the black woman too.”
Which the Klan promptly did, breaking her collarbone before ordering the two to go home. Jewel’s mother refused to call a doctor. “I don’t know who I’m going to see. A doctor might have been the one who hit me upside the head.” That night the Klan burned Mount Zion Church to the ground. The church bell, all that remained after the blaze, still stands there. It was hardly the first black church the Klan had set on fire; at least thirteen were destroyed in Mississippi that year.28 But their goal in burning this one was specific: they knew Mickey Schwerner would come to investigate the crime. Schwerner rushed back from a training session in Ohio, looking for information and affidavits he knew the local law enforcement would never seek. He was accompanied by James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. Goodman had just written his parents a postcard to say he’d arrived safely.
“They got it after he was dead,” said Jewel. “He talked about how good the people in Mississippi were, and I know it just tore her heart out.”
On their way back from the church the young men were arrested for speeding, a common enough way to harass civil rights workers and black people in general. But realizing he had “got Goatee,” the sheriff kept them in jail long enough for his fellow Klan members to organize a lynching party. Shortly after their release on the dark two-lane highway, three cars of Klansmen forced the civil rights workers’ station wagon to stop. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were taken to an even emptier road that ran by the ringleader’s property, and they were shot point-blank.
“You know why they wanted to do it here?” asked Leroy as he showed me the woody spot by the road where the killing was done. “Edgar Ray Killen said he drove by there every day, and he wanted to be able to look at the place and laugh.”
The crime was so well planned that the bodies, placed inside a newly built dam, would never have been found without the $25,000 reward the FBI later paid an informant. “They had them buried so deep you never would have smelled them,” said Jewel. “No bugs or no kinda bird would have found them.” In the intervening months, the local community insisted that the boys’ disappearance, and even the burning of the church, were a hoax cooked up by the civil rights movement to make Mississippi look bad. Meanwhile, the disappearance of two young white men was having the effect that SNCC expected. National and international press descended on the county. Unintimidated by anyone, from local police to President Lyndon Johnson, Rita Schwerner demanded that the federal government take immediate action to find her husband, while pointing out the injustice of the media attention he received. “If Mr. Chaney, a native Negro Mississippian, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, this case, like many before it, would have gone unnoticed.”29
By the time the bodies were found, they only confirmed what most had suspected: the young men had been killed shortly after they disappeared. In the meantime, their story helped lead to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as the Voting Rights Act the next year. Ninety-six percent of Mississippi voters opposed those laws. In Neshoba County, white concern about the murders was concern for the local reputation, for the crime had put the place in the national spotlight. If the black or white communities in Neshoba ever spoke about it, they spoke behind closed doors. Jewel, who married and went north for a time shortly after the murders, said she learned more when she left Mississippi than she learned there in the months after it happened. The Mount Zion community rebuilt its church quickly. A plaque inside the door reads
OUT OF ONE BLOOD GOD HATH MADE ALL MEN
This plaque is dedicated to the memory of
Michael Schwerner
James Chaney
Andrew Goodman
WHOSE CONCERN FOR OTHERS AND MORE PARTICULARLY THOSE OF THIS
COMMUNITY LED TO THEIR EARLY MARTYRDOM. THEIR DEATH QUICKENED
MEN’S CONSCIENCES AND MORE FIRMLY ESTABLISHED JUSTICE, LIBERTY AND BROTHERHOOOD IN THIS LAND.
The community also established a memorial service every year on Father’s Day, the anniversary of the murders. When Martin Luther King Jr. made his way through a violent mob to speak at the second anniversary, he called Philadelphia “a terrible town, the worst I have seen. There is a reign of terror here.”30
While the black community remembered, the white community did what it could to forget. In the North, tributes to the three heroes were made in speech, song, and literature, but just days after the bodies were unearthed, the white people of Neshoba County were engrossed in preparations for their annual fair, one of the biggest in the nation. The Neshoba County Fair calls itself “Mississippi’s giant house party”; the magazine Southern Living calls it the “sweet spot of all that’s sacred in the South.”31 Before the 1964 murders it was the only thing outsiders ever heard about Neshoba County. Between the bands and barbecues and horse races that go on for the hottest week in the summer, Mississippi politicians arrive to recruit votes and the Klan to recruit members. In 1980 Ronald Reagan made headlines as the first national politician to appear there. By declaring “I support states’ rights” just miles from the spot where the civil rights workers were murdered, Reagan revealed—to those who knew anything about dog whistles—that behind his grandfatherly pose he was a strong supporter of white supremacy, as his actions during his presidency would prove. His opposition to civil rights legislation, escalation of Nixon’s war on drugs, and support for apartheid South Africa were prefigured at Neshoba. Every Mississippian could decode the message.
The crime of the young men’s murder was compounded by the crime that took place thereafter. Though much of the town, as well as the FBI agents who investigated for months, knew the identities of most of those responsible, no one expected a local grand jury to issue an indictment for murder. On the night of the crime, the Klan chief Sam Bowers said to those present that no one who talked would live. Even forty years later, local citizens called to jury duty for the trial that finally took place said they would have to leave their jobs, their churches, or the county itself if they were part of a jury that found the ringleader guilty of murder.32
The federal justice system has no jurisdiction over murder cases, but in 1967 it did indict seventeen men for conspiracy to deprive the three slain activists of their civil rights. Back in Neshoba County, Florence Mars, the white woman righteous enough to testify, was forced to retire from teaching Sunday school, and her cattle ranch was subject to a Klan-instigated boycott so severe that she was forced to close her business.33 But despite the fact that the presiding judge called the murdered men “one nigger, one Jew and one white man,” seven of those charged were convicted of conspiracy, though their sentences were relatively short. It was, at least, an improvement on the trial of Emmett Till’s murderers.
By 1989, Mississippi had moved further. Its secretary of state, Dick Molpus, made a public apology to the families of the slain, who had come to Neshoba County for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the crime, faithfully held on Father’s Day at Mount Zion Church. A wealthy lumber merchant from Neshoba County, Molpus became the first local white man to publicly acknowledge the crime. Most Mississippians think that’s the reason he lost the governor’s race the following year.
It would be another fifteen years before the main organizer of the murders, Edgar Ray Killen, was brought to trial. He was eighty years old. The trial was one of the goals of the Philadelphia Coalition, the first tri-racial community organization in the county since Reconstruction. It included black, white, and Choctaw citizens, the last descendants of a large tribe forced to leave the county in 1833. The coalition’s immediate goal was to prepare for the fortieth anniversary of the murders, when hundreds of people were expected to arrive in Philadelphia. “We were actually just trying to organize and see what we needed for the fortieth,” Jewel explained. “Did we need Porta Potties, did we need to get phone lines set up in the church so the media could communicate?”
In the coalition, however, were a number of white lawyers and doctors. They knew who organized the killings, and they believed it was time to bring him to trial. The group met weekly—sometimes at city hall, sometimes at a local church—and, aided by Susan Glisson of the Winter Institute, its mission began to coalesce. Some members objected to working with a group located at the University of Mississippi, an institution well known for its racist history. Some people outside the coalition, such as James Chaney’s younger brother, Ben, even accused the coalition of harboring Klan members. Mickey Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, distrusted the process from the start. She feared there would be nothing but a show trial, an empty attempt to clear the town’s name. “I remember her saying ‘All these people want to do is get their books written,’” Jewel told me, “‘and I’m not helping them.’”
I took a long sip from the bottle of water on her kitchen table, and winced.
But the Winter Institute has a gift for helping diverse groups of people come together in ways that are honest without being brutal. And the now-retired Dick Molpus had said, “Until justice is done, we are all at least somewhat complicit in those deaths.”34 The coalition decided to push for a retrial, and they were successful in interesting a resolute and progressive state attorney general, Jim Hood. The case would be difficult. Key witnesses were dead, and much of the proof would rely on old testimony. Many people would balk at sending an eighty-year-old man—and a preacher, at that—to jail. Any local jury would resent the efforts of outsiders, including Jackson-based Jim Hood, to judge their affairs. As one Philadelphia resident put it during Killen’s trial, “It was like when the North came into the South after the Civil War and told us you have to do this, this, and this. We didn’t want to be told what to do.”35 Nevertheless, after a six-day trial on June 21, 2005, forty-one years to the day after the deaths he masterminded, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted. To the disappointment of the coalition and the victims’ families, who had come to testify at the trial, the evidence was only enough to convict for manslaughter. Still, the judge gave Killen three consecutive twenty-year sentences, one for each young man whose murder he ordered. He died in prison in January 2018.
“The Killen verdict was a real landmark,” said the historian Charles Reagan Wilson. “There have been a lot of civil rights murders and cases, but this one was particularly dramatic because it involved northerners and southerners, Jewish Americans as well as black Americans. This verdict will help the healing process, without question.”36
Would it? Or would it allow Mississippi to rest in the self-satisfaction that the horrors that stigmatized the state all belonged to the past. Certainly, healing took place between individuals. Jewel McDonald, for instance, described how she was approached anxiously by a white member of the coalition. “She grabbed my hand and she says, ‘I have to tell you: my ex-husband’s family is the one that beat your mother and brother.’ I said ‘Oh my God.’ Tears just started—she grabbed me and I grabbed her and we were just there a-boohooing and stuff. She says, ‘And I’m so sorry.’ I thought, well my Lord, that’s the first person to apologize to me. That’s how we became friends. I call her my soul sister, and she answers to it.”
What I learned at the Winter Institute: national reconciliation begins at the bottom. Very personal encounters between members of different races, people who represent the victims as well as those who represent the perpetrators, are the foundation of any larger attempt to treat national wounds. What I also learned at the Winter Institute: such encounters are only the foundation. They can lead to the reconciliation of communities built on them, using the trust thus developed to work together confronting the injustices that remain. Group by group, community by community, state by state, nation by nation. It is a long and weary process, but it is hard to see an alternative.
Shortly after the trial ended, Rita Schwerner Bender wrote an open letter to Mississippi governor Haley Barbour:
I am writing this letter because of recent and past actions of yours which are impediments to racial justice in Mississippi and our nation. Recently, after the verdict and sentencing in the Edgar Ray Killen trial in Neshoba County, you indicated your belief that this closed the books on the crimes of the civil rights years, and that we all should now have “closure” … There is yet much work to be done. As the governor of Mississippi, you have a unique opportunity to acknowledge the past and to participate in ensuring a meaningful future for your state. Please don’t squander this moment by proclaiming that the past does not inform the present and future.37
The Philadelphia Coalition announced that the trial was only the first step on the road to “seek the truth, to insure justice for all, and to nurture reconciliation.” Three brave young men were murdered not by a shotgun, but by the concerted efforts of an entire state, while “decent people remained silent while evil was done in their names. These shameful acts have been little understood by Mississippians.”38 The coalition concluded that their work had just begun.
Shortly thereafter, they were instrumental in pushing for the legislation signed by Governor Barbour to establish a civil rights curriculum for all grades in state public schools. Back in Philadelphia, the coalition created a Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Freedom School, now run by Leroy Clemons. As he showed me around the two large rooms that serve as his schoolhouse, we talked about fear.
“People outside Mississippi are afraid of being here, but in my generation it wasn’t passed on. People always say it’s a shame we didn’t know about the history, but I always say I’m glad. I’m afraid if they passed the stories down, they would also pass the fear and the hatred down.”
As a result, he said, he didn’t grow up being afraid of white people, even if they belonged to the Klan, which regularly burned crosses on the hill up the street from his home most Saturday nights.
“You saw the fires?”
“Yeah, and it didn’t faze us. On Sunday evenings we’d be up there on the same field playing softball. I can remember taking some of the charred wood and making bases.”
Leroy, the first of nine children, was born in 1957 to a single mother who became an alcoholic. When she was on a bender, he took care of his siblings, keeping them busy and away from the moonshine sold in the woods across the road. That’s how he explains his calling; he’s been taking care of kids ever since. “The Philadelphia Coalition was never about convicting an eighty-year-old man. It was about changing the narrative in this city and helping the young people to move forward.” Every child in the Freedom School knows the story of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, but Leroy works to understand why it happened. “You can’t go back and unring the bell once it’s been rung, but you can choose what to do with the aftermath of it. I want them to understand the conditions that allowed these things to take place and what they can do to eliminate those conditions and remove those obstacles, not only for themselves but for the next generation.”
Leroy exudes a nearly bottomless optimism. It’s easy to see how the seventy-eight high school students who trek to his after-school program each semester are inspired. In addition to the inspiration that’s usually missing in public schools, they also get discipline. Far too often, teachers approach black students with the lowest of expectations, refusing to expend energy helping children they believe will never learn. As a result, the children drop out or coast through school having learned next to nothing. Leroy is critical of many other programs. “Their philosophy is, we don’t teach kids how to read, we teach kids the love of reading. My thing is, if you can’t read, how can you love it?” Sometimes he places barely literate teenagers with younger children; while they think they’re teaching the youngsters, they improve their own skills. “They know Mr. Leroy don’t play. I’m going to let you have a little fun, and I’m going to feed you, but your purpose for being here is to learn. Life is not going to sugarcoat them, and I want them to be prepared.” As a result, the number of students in Philadelphia who graduate from college has skyrocketed, while the number of teenage pregnancies has dropped by 40 percent. The drug, alcohol, and crime rates there are very low. “It’s critical thinking,” says Leroy. “We teach them through the lens of history to deal with the issues of today.” Leroy makes education look not only cool but missionary. “I tell them, what we do in this room is not to be kept in this room. You have to share it with your friends who are not here. This room is where you learn to lead, and you don’t let other people control the narrative.”
Leroy grew even more buoyant in the room full of photos showing past and present students. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE heads one poster board, over pictures of students in graduation robes. Many college students return to teach at the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Freedom School in the summer. Pointing out pictures, Leroy glowed. “This young lady is planning to go to Ole Miss. That young lady played Rosa Parks in a skit. She’s a real performer.” Every year, the school prepares a short play for the National History Day Contest. One year they acted out the Mississippi Burning case—as the story of the murders in Philadelphia have come to be called—at the competition in Washington, D.C. “See that young lady?” asked Leroy, pointing. “That child was my biggest challenge.” Her mother got eight years in prison for shooting an abusive boyfriend; the child had witnessed the event. “I talked her into joining the group. She played the role of Jewel McDonald, and she did an outstanding job. They were on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The fact that I got her across that stage…” He paused, head shaking. “She’s graduated, too.”
Leroy Clemons, beaming in a small Mississippi town, is as resolute a defender of the Enlightenment as I ever met. He thinks racial hatred results from the ignorance that allows people to be manipulated. Edgar Ray Killen, for example. “He said the reason why the children came down for Freedom Summer was to train African American males to go out and rape white females.”
“Do you think he really believed that?”
“I do, because I’ve met people his age who still talk that way. That’s what drove them. I don’t fault them for their ignorance. I tell the kids all the time—when you’re ignorant, people can convince you to do anything.”
I’ve spent most of my adult life speaking up for the much-maligned Enlightenment, but even I can’t share Leroy’s infinite faith in it. Is it ignorance, for example, that drives the defacing of public monuments meant to teach people about history? I had seen the stones that Jewish visitors reverently place on the monument to Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, but I also saw the steel marker next to it that local people knocked down with a truck. The coalition got a stretch of highway named the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Memorial Highway, but more than once the sign has been splashed over with paint. I toured Martin Luther King Jr.’s parsonage in Montgomery, led by an ardent Southern belle who said she’d volunteer to clean the toilets in the house if there was no other work to do. I walked out to see an empty pack of baloney, thrown onto the porch by an Alabama good ole boy we never saw. Is it just ignorance that drives the reaction? A Harvard education was clearly of little use to Chief Justice John Roberts in his 2013 decision to gut the Voting Rights Act. “Why take the Voting Rights Act away now when it’s working?” asked Leroy. Passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act authorized federal oversight of election regulations in those states that had been known to suppress black citizens’ right to vote. Since the Supreme Court overrode the legislation, Republican state governments from Arizona to Virginia moved quickly to make voting more difficult for those poorer, largely minority citizens most likely to vote Democratic.
A year after that Supreme Court decision and fifty years after the murders, President Obama awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, to Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Chaney’s daughter, Goodman’s brother, and Schwerner’s widow came to the posthumous ceremony at the White House. Obama’s citation read “James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner still inspire us. Their ideals have been written into the moral fabric of our nation.” Reporting on the ceremony, Time magazine said that their names would be unfamiliar to most people today.
Speaking after the ceremony, Rita Schwerner Bender said that the best honor Congress could give these men would be to reinstate the Voting Rights Act and aggressively enforce it.
In the United States, debates over memorialization are raging. With the towering exception of the National Lynching Memorial, there are no large monuments remembering the victims of racial terror or dedicated to educating the public about the forces that led to those crimes. Small, local initiatives to remember and to educate, such as those devoted to Emmett Till or Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, are precariously supported. In addition to being woefully underfunded, the sparse monuments they build are often subject to violence.
“It’s so much healthier to have a marker that is desecrated than to have no marker that no one needs to desecrate,” said Bryan Stevenson when I mentioned that the Emmett Till marker had been shot up many times. “It expresses something about who we are. That even creates a little bit of change to some people in Mississippi.”
The same, I suppose, could be said of the far vaster monuments in Germany. Before the design for the Holocaust Memorial had even been approved, the federal government had already budgeted millions of marks to clean off expected graffiti. And while the stumbling stones may be funded, and cherished, by thousands of Germans, they are loathed by many others. On the 2017 anniversary of Kristallnacht, sixteen stones were dug up and destroyed by far-right activists. This matters, but so does the fact that hundreds of Berliners immediately responded with donations to replace the vandalized stones.
Before agreeing about appropriate ways of memorializing the victims of racist terror, Americans must come to agreement about the other monuments to white supremacy that remain standing. The 2015 massacre in Charleston created momentum. Among others, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu announced a week later that the city’s major monuments to Confederate heroes ought to go. In preparing for their removal, he sponsored a series of community dialogues in which a cross section of New Orleans citizens met monthly for more than a year. The William Winter Institute was invited to New Orleans to facilitate the discussions. Director Susan Glisson said, “If the process is democratic, respectful, and equitable, the outcome will be the same.” Some of the discussions focused on clarifying questions surrounding the controversy: No, the monuments were not erected after the war but a generation or two later, by white supremacists who sought to rewrite history by glorifying, and obscuring, the Confederate cause. No, the statues would not be destroyed, but put in a suitable museum. After nearly two years of discussion, public hearings, and judicial review, the New Orleans City Council voted 6–1 to declare four of the most egregious monuments a public nuisance. Mayor Landrieu gave a speech that was widely praised for its clarity and eloquence. Though it deserves to be read in full, I shall quote it in part:
New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures … But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold, and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape, of torture … So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well, what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth … These statues … are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for[,] … [and were] erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city … Relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else … This is … about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong.39
Nevertheless, the monuments were removed at night, under guard, to prevent the violence that the monuments’ supporters threatened. And shortly after the statues were removed from New Orleans in May 2017, the state of Alabama passed a law banning “the relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other disturbance of monuments, memorial streets, memorial buildings located on public property for more than forty years.” The state of Mississippi had no need to do so; its legislature had already passed a similar bill in 2004. In both states, Confederate Memorial Day is celebrated as a public holiday.
Such positions are under fire, as the racist demonstration at Charlottesville provoked the media to turn to a multitude of historians who had long ago shown the Lost Cause narrative to be baseless. The Civil War was fought not over states’ rights, but over slavery, as William James well knew. Should the historians’ consensus continue to sink into the general public, the conflicts over Confederate monuments will be laid to rest.
Bryan Stevenson isn’t waiting for an end to that conflict before beginning to do the work that comes next. His goal is no less than changing American identity—as, he argues, German identity has been changed by its own confrontation with its horrendous past. “We are not doomed by this history. We are not controlled by this history. But we cannot deny this history.”