I began writing this book at a moment that seemed so much more promising than the present that remembering it can make me weep. And that was after a massacre.
Rarely have a few years made such a difference. Despite the slaughter in a Charleston church, it was an easier time to feel hopeful. For once, during that summer of 2015, America seemed to come together around President Obama’s speech that followed a young white supremacist’s murder of nine African Americans. It was a Republican governor who took down the Confederate flag in South Carolina; it was the Arkansas-based Walmart that stopped the sale of Confederate memorabilia. America seemed ready to face down its past, and I thought I could contribute by sharing what I know about the Germany I’ve studied for thirty-five years. My conviction that the country had learned most of the lessons it needed from its own racist past seemed confirmed a few months later, when Germans outdid themselves by welcoming a million brown-skinned refugees with open arms.
That moment of hope has receded. With the possible exception of protecting rich people’s wealth, Donald Trump has no policy at all but to reverse every decision President Obama made, no matter the cost to the country or the world. He thereby exposed America’s two faces: one that the world wanted to believe in, the other that it suspected and feared. Those faces reveal the American antinomy—a philosopher’s word for two opposing claims that each look plausible, neither of which can ever be proved. It’s an opposition over the soul of America. Obama personifies the American ideal: with intelligence and fortitude, we can move toward fulfilling the aspirations America wrote into its founding documents. Trump embodies sheer determinism: there are no ideals that can’t be reduced to the naked struggle for wealth and power, the motor that moves us all. If Obama was the American dream—“Nowhere else on earth would my story be possible”—Trump is the American nightmare. After Charleston, we had a president who taught us grace. After Charlottesville, the voice from the White House praised “very fine people” who included unabashed Nazis.
It’s impossible to say which vision represents America. No matter what happens in 2020, or before, we will have to come to terms with the fact that the Trump presidency was possible. Like much of the world, I didn’t think it was. That’s not only because—though I know all the arguments against Providence—I share Obama’s belief in the power of reason and King’s vision of a moral arc that bends toward justice. My certainty wasn’t based only in faith, but in a 2016 statement signed by one hundred top brass in the U.S. military, who wrote that they’d take early retirement before they would serve under a Commander in Chief Trump. At the time, I found it ironic that the Pentagon would save us from disaster; now I am glad that military men of conscience have saved us from disaster by not resigning.
Americans aren’t the only ones who remember where they were, and what they were doing, on that November night when Obama was first elected. The election was greeted with unmixed joy—not only in most American cities but in most of the world. Even in Israel, the first country where a majority later turned against him, a major popular newspaper celebrated the event with the headline HA-TIKVAH—the hope—which is all the more astounding when you know that it’s the name of the Israeli national anthem, which has near-sacred status. Ireland proudly marked the birthplace of Obama’s mother’s great-grandfather as a national heritage site. The list could continue around the globe, but two events in 2009, when the rush of hope that accompanied the election was still fresh, now seem like premonitions.
The first was the public response to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in July. As it happened, I read of that arrest just before boarding a plane from Berlin to Boston, and I was outraged. Harvard professor Gates is the world’s foremost scholar of African American literature, whose achievements as a public intellectual made him widely known beyond the scholarly world; he is also a short older man who walks with a cane. Returning from a long journey after being feted in Beijing, he couldn’t find his house key, and was arrested for forcing open the back door of his own home in Cambridge. Surely, it seemed, this would confirm that police forces routinely mistreat African Americans. By the time I landed in Boston, the reaction was the opposite of what I’d expected. Instead of outrage over the arrest of a distinguished black man, much of the country was angry at the president for calling the policeman stupid—an expression I thought far too mild. The matter was considered settled when Obama invited both Gates and the cop for a beer at the White House. Still, the public mood was ominous.
The next month brought another reason for misgivings. Shortly before Labor Day 2009, the president announced his intention to give a back-to-school speech that would be broadcast to schools throughout the nation. No one raised objections when Reagan and Bush Senior had done the same. Besides, anyone who’d read Obama’s beautiful Dreams from My Father could predict what the speech would contain: he’d talk about how his mother woke him at four a.m. as a child in Indonesia to make sure he had more English lessons than were offered at the local school. See, kids? Study hard and you too could become president.
The burgeoning Tea Party staged protests against this innocuous message. Across the country, parents threatened to keep their children home from school that day so they wouldn’t be “forced to listen to the president’s socialist speech.” The White House averted a crisis by releasing an advance copy of the speech that showed it was just as harmless, and just as American, as anyone with good sense had supposed. Still, the protests were the beginning of popular determination to oppose anything that came from a White House run by a black man. If he could hardly give a speech telling children to study, how was he supposed to close Guantanamo?
Since 2016, many have argued that it was white supremacist resistance that propelled the least qualified man ever to run for the presidency into the White House.1 Donald Trump’s ability to feed white anxiety and rage was demonstrated by everything from his entry into politics as a champion of the birther movement to his description of all Africa as “shithole countries.” It’s the same strategy Nixon and Reagan deployed to push the Republican Party toward the racist right. Trump’s use of that strategy is so loud and clear that it hardly counts as a dog whistle. Anyone at all can hear it. But rather than repeat the many arguments that have shown how Trump’s presidency is fueled and run through racism, let’s turn to the closest thing the social sciences have to hard evidence: polling data.
The award-winning pollster Cornell Belcher devised a series of questions that connect what he calls “negative racial attitudes” with political decisions.2 Belcher was careful to avoid skewing the data by avoiding questions that elicit only socially acceptable answers. Few people today will admit to being racist. Though some Republicans carried signs reading KEEP THE WHITE HOUSE WHITE before the 2012 election, most suggested that he was not one of us by focusing on his name. Obama sounded like Osama, who’d been responsible for the deaths of three thousand Americans, and Hussein could only be associated with the Iraqi dictator American troops had recently vanquished. After Obama’s enthusiastic welcome during his 2008 trip to Europe, John McCain ran an ad suggesting that the European cheers implied that Obama wasn’t a real American. (I reported on the crowd during Obama’s Berlin speech; almost half of it actually consisted of expat Americans who’d come from all corners of Europe to express their weariness with George W. Bush.) The fact that Obama’s absent father was a Muslim and that he’d spent several years in Indonesia were coded accusations for those who suspected that, in the twenty-first century, the N-word would fall flat.
Recognizing this, Belcher took polls that measured implicit negative sentiments toward black people, primarily in the political realm. Racial antagonism was measured by reactions to statements like “Reverse discrimination is a growing problem today” or “Too often minorities use racism as an excuse for their own failures.” The statistics showed that in October 2008, racial aversion was similar among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Just after Obama entered the White House, the groups diverged in dramatically different directions, with a huge spike in negative sentiments toward blacks among Republicans and to a lesser degree among Independents. Racial attitudes were responsible for a thirty-seven-point difference in Obama’s positive image. Belcher’s team asked voters whether certain characteristics designed to measure racial stereotypes correlated with support for a presidential candidate in 2008. For example, Obama was viewed by a fifteen-point margin as “more likely to have benefited from unfair and undeserved advantage” than McCain. I leave the reader to wonder how Obama, who had barely finished paying off his student loans when he entered office, could be considered unfairly advantaged compared with McCain, who could not, on the campaign trail, remember how many homes he owned. (The answer turned out to be eight.)
Belcher’s study went to print just before the 2016 election, but it included polls taken during the campaign that show that the racial aversion studies he correlated with antagonism toward Obama in 2008 and 2012 were just as useful predicting support for Trump in 2016.3 “Let’s stop pretending it’s about something other than race,” Belcher concluded. “The right has demonstrated time and time and time again that they’d rather sink the country and see its citizens suffer than do business with a black man.”4 Obama was not, as the right charged, responsible for worsening racial tension, but he was a catalyst for showing just how badly Americans need to face problems that have plagued the nation these four hundred years.
Obama preferred to face the future. In that, too, he was very American. He’d opposed the war in Iraq, but made clear he wouldn’t consider investigating the previous administration for war crimes. His personal behavior in office was as forward-looking as it was flawless; indeed, his entire family was exemplary. “I can’t imagine how awful it must be to be a teenager in the White House,” said one of my daughters just out of her teens. “But the first African American teenagers in the White House? Talk about pressure! And they were awesome.” As was their mother. After joking, “I hope the president will forgive me,” Paul McCartney launched into “Michelle” during a concert at the White House, and the moment felt historic. When he sang it in the ’60s, the only available images, at least for white people, were girls who looked like Carla Bruni. Now the strong, grown-up, black, and beautiful Michelle Obama was the emblem of desire. Hadn’t the post-racial future arrived?
As Ta-Nehisi Coates observed, Barack Obama’s unusual biography ensured that he grew up without distrust of white people. His international experiences only strengthened the universalism he learned in Hawaii. His personal behavior was so flawless because he had good reason to believe in the better angels of our nature. His inimitable combination of idealism, intelligence, and cool was not a mask.
Yet there was something he let slip at the fateful White House correspondents’ dinner in April 2011. It was a time when right-wing politicians looking for another way to delegitimize America’s first black president promoted the theory that Obama was secretly born in Kenya, hence ineligible for the presidency. Donald Trump became the face of the “birther movement,” which claimed that Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate was faked and insisted that the president release more evidence of his American birth. Coming onstage to the tune of “Real American,” Obama proposed to lay any doubts to rest by releasing his birth video—and proceeded to show the beginning of The Lion King, playfully facing and trouncing the birthers’ racism. The president continued his remarks by addressing Trump directly, with a few well-aimed jabs suggesting that the reality TV star had jumped on the birther bandwagon for lack of any serious work to do.
Later we would learn he’d delivered that brilliant performance while some part of his brain was occupied with weather reports from Abbottabad, and the not-yet-final decision to target Osama bin Laden the next day. Even without that knowledge, the evening was so stunningly funny that I have replayed the video of the dinner more than once. The man for whom I’d knocked on New Hampshire doors was finally pushing against the dim-witted racists who clogged our airwaves and minds. Let it rip, I thought, show them The Lion King.
Obama’s speech was brilliant, but brilliance can be snarky. That speech was the only instance of public snark in his entire presidency. Donald Trump, the object of Obama’s contempt, couldn’t have deserved it more. The attack on his lies was just, but it proved to be dangerous because, more than anything else, snark is uppity. At the time, I loved it, for it reminded me why Barack Hussein Obama made me glad to be American. Trump’s glowering face did not, at the time, seem portentous; a black man had just dismissed him as a fool.
Though I’m certain Obama has regretted the speech he gave that night, the evening was hardly the cause of Donald Trump’s rise to power. But it did suggest that a black man must be not only perfect, but perfectly humble, to get a seat at the table. Although no one factor is enough to explain the results of the 2016 election, the white supremacists who gnashed their teeth over the presence of a black family in the White House played a crucial role. When Obama got uppity, they snapped.
Historians avoid counterfactual speculation, and philosophers should be wary of it too. Surely no single cause will explain the 2016 American election: Clinton’s tone-deafness, Russian interference, and a mighty portion of sexism all played their parts. Yet it’s hard to imagine that Donald Trump would have been elected had Americans done their historical homework. George Orwell distinguished patriotism, the simple devotion to a particular place, from blind and violent nationalism, which he believed to depend on historical lies. “Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered … Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.”5 The rise of the Tea Party following Obama’s first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America’s psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who’d never fully faced American darkness.
All right, you may wonder, America never did the hard work to face its past that Germany has done. But if German working off is so exemplary, what explains the rise of the AfD? Nazis rioting in the streets of Saxony?
Just about a year after the Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, pictures of Nazi demonstrations went around the world again, this time from a small German city called Chemnitz. (Not all demonstrators in either place were Nazis, but it was chilling enough that the ones who weren’t Nazis were willing to march with those who were.) Both demonstrations flaunted fury and fire, but there were important differences. First among them: Angela Merkel immediately condemned the violence. “Hate has no place in this country.” A few days later, leading politicians from every party but the AfD came to Chemnitz to mourn the violence and to challenge the right. Counterdemonstrators carried homemade signs: I’M A JEW; I AM A FOREIGNER FROM CROATIA; I AM ROMA. The original right-wing demonstration was triggered by the killing of a local resident, allegedly by an Iraqi and a Syrian refugee. “If the police can’t protect the people, it’s natural for the people to take to the streets,” commented the AfD party chief Alexander Gauland, but it’s hardly natural they should take to the streets chasing brown people, as the mob had done. Chemnitz is located in Saxony, long considered the most right-wing state in Germany even before the Nazi era. Think Mississippi.
Although the riot of four thousand white nationalists was first-page news in much of the world, the concert that followed ten days later was not. Organized by seven bands that gave the free concert to protest right-wing violence, it drew sixty-five thousand people from all over Germany, with a hashtag that read #wearemore. The German historian Jan Plamper showed that even in 2018, far more Germans were actively engaged in supporting refugees than voted for right-wing parties.6 But evil reliably attracts more attention than goodness. Six weeks later, the demonstration against right-wing racism that brought a quarter of a million people to the streets of Berlin—one of the largest demonstrations in postwar German history—attracted scant international notice.
To those who say that the mob in Chemnitz showed that German working off didn’t get rid of German racism, and those who say that the election of a black president didn’t get rid of American racism, I want to point to the half-full glass. It’s unlikely that racism anywhere will ever be entirely uprooted; the urge to blame your troubles on strangers is too old and too deep. Yet in my own lifetime we’ve come some distance in reducing racism. On the other hand, I’d never urge complacence; to those who urge calm and take it all in stride … actually, there aren’t very many. Much of the world is alarmed, and rightly so. Nonetheless, in an issue of Die Zeit devoted to the question, the historian Michael Wildt concluded, “No, we are not threatened with a new 1933. All the signs point rather to the country’s determination to defend an open society of solidarity.”7
The riots in Chemnitz made visible the fears that gripped Germany a year earlier, when the AfD won more than 12 percent of the vote and entered the national parliament, the first time a radical-right party had done so since the war. As of this writing, there’s no indication that the AfD incited that riot directly, but they’re the second-strongest party in Saxony, and they’ve been inciting racism for years.
The AfD shares a number of tendencies with Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. In a picturesque town overlooking the Rhine, its members celebrated Trump’s victory the day after his election, together with leaders of right-wing parties from France, Holland, Austria, and Italy. The most extreme white supremacist supporters of those parties call themselves identitarians, decrying internationalism and insisting on the “right of peoples to determine their own identity.” If minorities can play identity politics, why the hell should we abstain? They detest political correctness—politische Korrektheit—and prefer politicians who practice the kind of vulgar straight talk that exasperates the establishment. Those who speak moderately are suspected of being too close to traditional centers of power. They consider any reckoning with their country’s crimes to be capitulation to a “guilt cult,” and spend much of their time denouncing Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, often to disguise the fact that much of their program comes dangerously close to the Nazis’ own. They claim that immigrants are rapists, and sprinkle anti-refugee propaganda with repeated warnings of danger to our women. On a continent whose vast majority accepts the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is a major global threat, the AfD denies it. Its economic program is vague but for a desire to eliminate inheritance taxes and promote other tax support for the wealthy. The party has fewer women than men, who are evidently moved by anxieties about manhood. “Germany has lost its masculinity,” said one ranking party leader. They are systematically but not openly anti-Semitic. Some AfD politicians have cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and referred to “the Jewish truth of the Holocaust”; one member of parliament drives a car with a license plate that references Hitler. Most members know that anti-Semitism is taboo, so they raise their voices loudly for the State of Israel while seeking to court Jews with anti-Muslim positions. They come from a variety of economic and educational backgrounds. What unites them is not class, but mood: a sense of pessimism, nostalgia, and suspicion.
Those characterizations were taken not from the AfD’s many center-left critics, but from the 2018 book Inside AfD, the first to be written by a former active party member.8 Franziska Schreiber wrote that she joined the AfD before it was the nationalist, racist party its critics claimed it was from the beginning; only after 2017, she thought, did it move firmly to the right. Perhaps the critics noticed tendencies she initially overlooked; she was only twenty-three, after all, when she came to the party. What made Schreiber’s book interesting was not the confirmation of the racist nationalism that most already suspected, but her description of the tactics she is now ashamed to have used.
“We need fearful people,” said Frauke Petry, a former head of the party who was forced out for being too moderate. Schreiber described how the AfD manufactured fear without facts. The facts left little to fear: the German economy is growing, unemployment is declining, crime statistics are improving; after Germany took in one million refugees in 2015, even the flow of refugees sharply decreased. “Almost everything in the AfD began with a Facebook post,” Schreiber wrote. “Facebook is the AfD’s battleground.” She described the competition between AfD members: who could write the most provocative claim that would put the party in the news; who could best twist establishment politicians’ statements. When, for example, the interior minister said, “We will never be able to rule out the possibility of terrorism one hundred percent,” she wrote the headline “INTERIOR MINISTER NO LONGER RULES OUT TERRORISM!” In fact, she revealed, the AfD had to restrain itself from loudly celebrating the terror they knew would strengthen their ranks. In addition to distorting statements and spreading outright lies, the AfD falsified Facebook accounts to make it appear that they supported one faction of the party while sowing dissention and chaos in all of them. As the moderates left the party, the number of conspiracy theorists grew.
Schreiber’s claims about AfD’s use of Facebook were validated by two researchers at the University of Warwick in 2018.9 Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz confirmed that the AfD has by far the largest number of Facebook users of any political party, and they scrutinized every anti-refugee attack from 2016 to 2018, analyzing the communities in which those attacks occurred for every relevant variable: demographics, wealth, political leanings, newspaper sales, number of refugees, and history of hate crimes. One factor stood out. Whether city or town, affluent or modest, liberal or right-leaning: wherever Facebook use was higher than average, so was the number of hate crimes. Wherever Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above average, attacks on refugees rose by 50 percent. That isn’t to say that Facebook causes racism and violence. It’s just a better tool for escalating them than any ever devised.
This will sound eerily familiar to observers of the U.S. and British politics that led to Trump and Brexit, but there are important contrasts. To assure its readers that having a radical-right party in parliament wasn’t the first step to electing another Donald Trump, editors of Germany’s distinguished weekly Die Zeit rushed to count seven structural differences between the United States and Germany. The AfD itself doesn’t expect to win enough votes to lead the country. Its goal is to take enough votes from the center-right to be invited to join a government in Germany’s complex coalition politics. So far, every party in the nation has vowed to refuse a coalition with them, and even the conservative tabloid Bild, Germany’s most widely read paper, condemns the AfD. In the meantime, the AfD’s goal is to push popular opinion toward the right. On the refugee question, they’ve had considerable success—which has forced one traditional party to adopt some of their positions.
Another important contrast between the AfD and American or British right-wing nationalism has to do with local history. Although most of the AfD leaders come from West Germany, where the party received the largest number of votes, a larger proportion of the population supports the party in East Germany, where Chemnitz is located. Those Westerners inclined to reflexive disdain for the former GDR have argued that those proportions are explained by the GDR’s failure to work through the Nazi past. But we have seen that this claim is misleading, and there’s a more likely explanation for the AfD’s success in the East. The party plays on long-standing, often justified, East German resentment.
The old West German constitution mandated that a new constitution would be written when the country was unified. In the rush to reunification, that proviso was ignored. Easterners were never asked for their vision of the new state, but simply incorporated into the old one, leaving Easterners to feel less reunited than annexed. Jokes about Easterners are still regularly told in circles that wouldn’t countenance anti-Semitic or anti-Turkish ones—only one of many reasons East Germans often feel scorned. The sociologist Naika Foroutan, director of the Humboldt University’s Institute for Integration and Migration Studies, documents similar prejudice toward East Germans and migrants; both are still treated as second-class citizens. The discrepancy between East and West pensions, which are calculated on the basis of lifetime salaries, is a central source of resentment. With rent, food, transportation, and culture all heavily subsidized, GDR salaries were low, and its citizens had neither reason nor opportunity to save for retirement. Now pensioners in the East rage at refugees who receive state support. The AfD has succeeded in exploiting that rage and giving some East Germans that thin sense of self-respect that’s so often built on the denigration of others.10
“The East was barely visible until it moved to the right,” wrote Jana Hensel, an author who was born in East Germany in 1976. Her hometown, Leipzig, was splendidly renovated after the country was unified, but 94 percent of the restored old buildings belong to Westerners. Eastern hostility toward the Welcome Culture that embraced the refugees, she holds, stems from the fact that East Germans themselves feel unwelcome in the nation as a whole. “Inter-German resentments are one of the biggest taboos in our society.” Hensel rejects the West German claim that right-wing tendencies in East Germany result from the GDR’s supposed failure to work off the Nazi past. “That claim is a projection,” she wrote. “West Germans cannot imagine the omnipresence of antifascism in the GDR, even in my generation, because they had nothing comparable.” The era that needs working off, she argued, is the era just after reunification, when contempt for East Germans and disregard for their memories created resentment that has only grown since the 1990s. That contempt produced a picture of the East in the Western media that fuels a tendency to dismiss every traditional media report as Lügenpresse—fake news.11
The AfD’s representatives present differently from the average Trump supporter. They appear mild, trim, well-dressed, and often well-spoken. When I met Andreas Kalbitz, head of Brandenburg’s AfD, he insisted he was not an intellectual but a politician, yet he was smart, well-informed, and quoted Adorno. He also listened with interest to what I had to say. Ever since the AfD entered parliament, there’s been a national debate about how to treat them. If they were democratically elected, should a democratic state ignore them? Or were they wolves in sheep’s clothing who did not deserve the legitimization a conversation would confer? The Nazis, after all, came to power in the Weimar Republic’s last democratic election. Initially, none of the parties was even willing to sit next to the AfD in the Reichstag. I was curious.
An accident of timing left me meeting eleven young women with foreign roots just before my appointment with Kalbitz. They were all studying German literature at a good university, training to be high school teachers or, with luck, professors. They were first- and second-generation immigrants, and some of them could pass for dark-haired ethnic Germans; the Afro-German and the Kurdish woman in a hijab could not. They wanted to talk about diversity and intersectionality, two words that have no real German equivalents. A woman whose parents were from Croatia was interested in African American history. “Doesn’t the U.S. refuse to work off its history of slavery?” she asked. “I think we’ve worked off our history better.” The Kurdish woman disagreed: industrial mass murder was worse than anything, anywhere, and it should never be compared. I smiled, for it was a very German discussion.
Two hours later, in the offices of the Brandenburg State Parliament, I mentioned the meeting to Kalbitz. Those young women had flawless command of the language; they loved German literature. Weren’t they examples of the perfect integration the AfD thinks impossible? The state party leader looked disgruntled. “We have to be realistic and accept the foreigners who are already here,” he told me, “as long as they don’t become a majority.”
The AfD magnified German racism, and made its expression more acceptable, but it did not create it. Several people of color have told me that the German taboo on racism is confined to anti-Semitism and only extended to people who look white. Peggy Piesche, for example, has a Ph.D. in German literature, but she was the product of a tryst between a working-class white German and a Nigerian medical student. Though she believes the GDR was on the right side of history in its support for decolonizing countries and its antiapartheid stance, she experienced racism in East Germany, just as she does in Berlin today. Despite having taught German, gender studies, and Africana at both German and American colleges, when she tells people that she hails from Thuringia, she is regularly greeted with the question “Where are you really from?”
“It’s better at American universities,” she told me coolly, “but the universities there are so isolated. The distance from the university to public opinion is much shorter in Germany.” Her experience was amply confirmed by a 2018 hashtag, #MeTwo, in which thousands of Germans of color described their experiences of ordinary racism. All had often encountered the ubiquitous question “Where are you really from?,” which, Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote, actually means “What are you?” Many had experienced worse: elementary school teachers who tried to track them into vocational rather than higher education, Turkish men who used their German wives’ names in order to obtain apartments or jobs. Worst of all: Germany had just concluded the trial of the only surviving member of the National Socialist Underground, which managed to kill nine people of color, most of them Turkish, before killing themselves in 2011. The surviving member showed no regret and was sentenced to life without parole, but those who helped her received milder sentences, and the country was shaken by what the trial revealed. The police had ignored the killings for a decade, imputing them to Turkish gangsters with foreign ways. There are indications that some policemen assigned to surveil the National Socialist Underground actually supported them.
Though some refugees posted tales of warm welcome under #MeTwo, ethnic Germans who never experienced discrimination were shocked by the outpouring. To their credit, the center- and left-leaning parties quickly issued statements declaring the need for more awareness of everyday racism. Unlike Britain or France, Germany had but a handful of colonies, so street scenes in Berlin are whiter than those of London or Paris. Unlike the United States or Canada, Germany never considered itself a land of immigration. Until the Social Democratic/Green government changed the law in 2000, German citizenship was based on German ethnicity. (Blood had been decisive, even when the soil on which ethnic Germans were born was as far away as the Volga.) Now that darker-skinned people have begun to appear as politicians, journalists, and media personalities, is it reasonable to expect that racism will decline?
Samuel Schidem doesn’t think so. He’s an Israeli Druze who came to Germany to study philosophy in 1999. He stayed in Berlin, where he married a German woman. Now his main job is educating new refugees about the Holocaust, which he does in the offices of the Topography of Terror, the museum devoted to the Gestapo torture chambers. Samuel dismissed the idea that Muslim anti-Semitism could be cured by a trip to concentration camps or bombed-out torture cells, as some politicians have urged. He believes it can be confronted only by the sort of personal, long-term education he practices in his seminars. “You need to relate the Holocaust to their own experiences,” he told me. “These people have been close to death in ways few Europeans ever know. Every one of them is a hero.” The Iranian in the class was severely tortured during nine years in prison. He walks with a limp and a cane, and he’ll never be whole again. Several of the Syrians suffered in Assad’s prisons; all lost homes and family members to his bombs. Over generations, even before the founding of the State of Israel, they’d been taught to fear Jews. It’s not their fault they swallowed poison where there was nothing else to drink. Samuel encourages them to talk about their experiences under dictatorships and the everyday racism they meet in encounters with German bureaucracy. Then he relates it to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. “Every one of this group knows what it’s like to be locked up without trial.”
Samuel was willing to invite me to a seminar, provided I was willing to answer questions he’d ask his students to prepare. Though many were well-educated, most had never met a Jew. Did I believe in eternity? asked the sad-eyed, kind Iranian. Samuel emphasized similarities between Sharia law and traditional Jewish halakhah. A young Syrian threw what might have become a bombshell: “Aren’t the Jews ashamed? Why don’t they do something about the occupation of Palestine?” I exhaled slowly and said that many Jews, even in Israel, abhor Netanyahu’s government. I talked about fear and the role of American Evangelicals, I hemmed and I hawed until Samuel interrupted. “Aren’t the Arabs ashamed?” he countered. “Why don’t they get rid of Assad? Al-Sisi? The Saudi monarchy?” As a Druze, a minority within a minority, he understands both sides, and he could say what I could not. Abashed, the students nodded, and the discussion turned to forms of effective political action. “Here’s my hope for the future,” Samuel concluded, pointing toward the Topography museum’s exhibit on Nazi torture. “We’ll all meet in Aleppo at the opening of an exhibit about Assad’s war crimes.”
Yet Samuel is not, in general, hopeful. Nor does he think German working off has succeeded. It has focused on the political forms of racism, not their day-to-day expression. Even worse, he thinks, educators have failed to universalize the Holocaust and have focused only on European history. As a result, they’ve missed the chance to teach general lessons about prejudice, persecution, and genocide. “The lesson most Germans learn from history is: be nice to Jews.” I demurred; the 2015 welcome given to one million Muslims was a powerful counterexample, subsequent backlash not withstanding. But Samuel’s experience, echoed by many other people of color, will not be denied. Nor is it easy to understand why his own work is so precariously funded. While the radical right is one source of the recent rise in anti-Semitism, the other is the increase of Muslim immigrants angry over Palestine. German media has repeatedly debated the question: How can we be fair to both Muslims and Jews? There are a couple of small community groups that bring Muslims and Jews together; the rabbi of the most liberal Berlin congregation went out of her way to show Jewish support for Syrian refugees. But there is, to my knowledge, nothing else like the sort of education Samuel practices. “They think it should come as a pill,” he said. “One trip to a concentration camp, and you’re cured of anti-Semitism.”
I asked the journalist Mariam Lau whether she’s experienced racism. Though she grew up in Germany, she was born in Tehran, and she takes after her Iranian father. “Never,” she said. “Except perhaps the moment at the cash register when the cashier looks impatient because she doesn’t know if I speak German. I don’t look like I come from here, so they’re confused.” Both her skin tone and hair texture code: person of color. “But I never experienced real racism.”
Mariam trained as a nurse and worked in a hospital for five years before deciding to go to university, where she majored in American studies. She wrote several books and worked as a journalist at different newspapers before landing a job as a political reporter at Die Zeit. For a time she was assigned to cover the Green party; since the AfD was elected in 2017, she’s been responsible for covering it.
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “Normally I have no contact with people like that. I could write a long piece about them every week, but there’s a consensus in the editorial board not to treat them like a normal party. Every time we write about them, we risk becoming part of their propaganda machine by putting their ideas in public. I ask myself before every interview how warmly I should treat them.”
“How do they treat you?”
“I’ve asked directly what they think of my background,” she replied. “There’s no problem with you, Frau Lau,” said party leader Gauland. She is fully integrated into German culture. Her family invites mine to Christmas dinner. “They know I’m Iranian and my father fled from the mullahs. What matters to them is that I’m not a Muslim.” The AfD glorifies German culture, though they have no clear definition of it. “There are members who never heard of Hölderlin and those who quote Brecht and Goethe. Not West-Eastern Divan, of course,” she said, and smiled. One of Goethe’s late works was an enthusiastic dialogue with Islamic poetry. “They’re full of contradiction.”
Mariam believes things would have been different had Merkel taken full political responsibility for the refugees. “She should have said, Look, people, we’re a wealthy country, and the Syrians’ homes are in flames. We’ll get the UNHCR to check for terrorists, but we ought to take them in.” Had she gone on the offensive, Mariam thinks, a majority of the nation would have stood behind her. But Merkel’s forte is waffling. The message she signaled was: things are happening that we don’t want, but it’s against the law to close the border. She waited and waffled and finally followed the majority mood, which in 2015 was welcoming—when she should have been leading it.12
Throughout Europe, the refugee question has become critical. Germany has been far more welcoming than any of its neighbors, but Mariam thinks the problems will continue until all European liberals find an answer to the question Who are we? But she knows that Europeans are anxious about patriotism, which is not the same thing as nationalism. “Germans have acknowledged our guilt, which is our great achievement,” said Mariam. “No civilization before was able to face its own crimes and mature through that recognition. But in the long run it’s not enough. People need to be able to show their flag.” Now many Germans do, at least during soccer season. Gone are the days when liberal-left Germans rejected all of German culture because of those fatal twelve years.
“It’s the AfD that keeps bringing them up,” she added. They say that working off was imposed by Americans and Europeans who sought to weaken German citizens through guilt in order to exploit them economically. The AfD began as a tiny party opposed to the euro; many view the European Union as an “eternal Versailles,” always emphasizing German guilt. “They don’t understand that being able to say ‘Yes, that was us’ is a step toward adulthood,” Mariam continued. “We not only did horrible things, we lost so very much. Think where Germany’s film industry would be had we not eliminated so many Jews; think of science and literature. I suspect the AfD can’t bear to admit that.” Instead they argue that those Germans who do admit it suffer from pathological self-hatred.
Mariam granted that German history is easier for her to bear because of her own family background. Her German grandfather wasn’t a resistance hero, but he wasn’t a soldier either. As a member of the church founded by the theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bohnhoeffer, he engaged in small acts of sabotage at the factory where he worked. Still, she’s astonished that few German soldiers ever owned up to their war crimes. Talking of Günther Grass, Mariam grew furious. “He could have done so much to help the country had he taken the lead. He should have said I was in the Waffen-SS and here’s why I did it and now I’m ashamed.” Instead he spent forty years moralizing and pointing the finger at others, until the truth came out. “I was moved by John Kerry, who stood up and acknowledged that what he’d done in Vietnam was wrong,” she concluded. “I would call that manly.” Most AfD members she meets seem traumatized. They complain of a masculinity deficit, though what they mean is that traditional male roles have waned where feminism has made progress.
Mariam wishes that conservative politicians would stand up to the AfD by showing that their gloomy worldview is false. Unemployment has never been lower, exports have never been higher, and education has never been more attainable. By any objective measure, the idea that the country is headed for catastrophe is absurd. But conservatives fear losing votes to the AfD, and Merkel’s sister party, the Christian Social Union, has been willing to create government crises just to fan anti-refugee flames. Mariam sees little hope that the AfD will abandon its radical-right stance. “They’ve tasted blood,” she said, “and they’ve had success. Why should they ask themselves if they’re doing anything wrong?”
“The older I become, the more I realize how much I owe to my parents.” Gesine Schwan was born in 1943, but for the last twenty years, at least, she has looked timeless. Her blond hair is graying, but its curls are swept up in a playful style. Her energy is astonishing: she has been, among other things, a professor of political science, the author of many books, the president of two universities, and the Social Democrats’ candidate for president. Through it all she finds time to mentor younger people seeking to echo her kind of pragmatic idealism. Her parents were socialists who admired Rosa Luxemburg, and kept a Jewish girl in hiding during the war years. Gesine and her brother were raised to honor one task: to work toward a world where what happened under the Nazis would never happen again. She has no truck with those who claim Germany’s changes are merely superficial, and she insists the changes are not merely generational. “One can pass on racist, authoritarian attitudes from one generation to the next. They must be deliberately interrupted—and they were.” Early on, she learned French and Polish, the languages of Germany’s erstwhile enemy neighbors.
A devout Catholic, she remembers praying as a child that Adenauer would lose an election. His relationship to the Nazi past, she told me, was an example of the Christian Democrats’ “tactical relationship to the truth.” As head of the Social Democrats’ Commission on Basic Values, she remains committed to finding alternatives to Christian Democratic policies—particularly in regard to the refugees. “Merkel never had a strategy beyond the catchphrase ‘We’ll manage,’” she said. “The problem began well before 2015.” The German government refused to show solidarity with its neighbors, both in its dealings with Greece during the debt crises and in leaving the lion’s share of refugees where they landed in Italy and Greece. “Why was the government surprised when other countries refused to show solidarity with us when we took in a million refugees?” A passionate defender of European ideals, Gesine believes the refugee question needs a European solution. “We have to begin by viewing this as an opportunity rather than a crisis. Given our demographics, the boat is far from full.” Europe’s population is aging, and its birthrate is falling. She finds current policies merely defensive, walking a halfhearted line that reduces neither nationalist anger nor the number of refugees who drown.
She has proposed a model that would bypass national antagonisms and work directly between the European Union and local communities. Small towns and rural communities have lost so many young people to the cities that their already meager infrastructures—one reason why young people leave in the first place—are on the verge of ruin. A central European fund could offer such communities a large carrot: figure out what you need in order to integrate the number of refugees you’re willing to accept, and we’ll not only pay for their integration, we’ll give you an equal amount of funding for other projects you’d like to further. Improving schools, renovating housing, creating local culture. Theater, for example. “Don’t groan,” said Gesine, as she explained the proposal to an audience in Essen. “I was involved in theater groups when I was young. Putting yourself in different roles is an excellent way to create empathy for differences.”
The key to the project is community self-determination. She envisions groups of citizen stakeholders—church groups, businesspeople, teachers, scientists—coming together to work out, in detail, exactly how they want their communities to grow. “Identity and integration require working together, not just receiving money from a distant government.” Top-down solutions inevitably provoke resentment.
She doesn’t believe enough consensus can be built at the national level, but she has faith in communities. Ninety percent of those who have taken in refugees say it has enriched them. Studies on anti-Semitism show that it’s greatest in places where there are no Jews; the same is true of anti-immigrant sentiment. Gesine proposes a solution that would revitalize desolate communities, provide homes for refugees, and revive local democracy, all at once. “In English they call it killing two birds with one stone, but that sounds cruel.” She smiled. “I prefer the German expression: two flies with one swat. You start with two, because people can be slow, but eventually we’ll hit twenty-five.” The European Parliament is enthusiastic about the proposal, the first that addresses both its current major crises at once: undermining populist nationalism and providing refuge for those migrants who continue to wash up on Mediterranean shores. Gesine spends a considerable amount of time speaking to groups whose support will be needed, from labor unions to Brussels bureaucrats. She is hopeful that, with their help, she will convince the European Union to put its money behind the enthusiasm. The cost, she says, should be seen as investment. Then again, Gesine is the kind of person who radiates hope on a daily basis. I asked how she maintains it; what keeps her activism so constant? “It’s partly genetic,” she acknowledged. “But staying active is the only way to ward off despair.”
Even before the AfD came to power, many German intellectuals were uneasy with the way their country had worked off its past. In the ’60s, the only doubting voices came from the right, which had its own reasons to discourage talk of recent history; most of them had been on the wrong side of it. Now a different form of skepticism has risen on the left. Refusing to celebrate the success of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is in one sense natural, in another simply decent: taking pride in your own repentance would come close to a contradiction in terms.
Aleida Assmann explained other reasons for recent discontent with German memory culture. Formerly a professor of English literature, Aleida was awarded—together with her husband, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann—Germany’s highest literary honor, the Peace Prize, for their work on historical memory. In 2018, saluting their work at the Frankfurt Book Fair was a political act at a time when Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is again under attack. The Assmanns responded by donating the prize money to three organizations working to integrate different groups of refugees. “People detest the idea that Germans are memory world champions,” she told me. “There are Europeans who say that Merkel is trying to do peacefully what Hitler did with war.” Both, critics say, were determined to dominate Europe. Being self-critical about Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, said Aleida, is a necessary part of the process itself.
Some of the criticism is generational. There is a (Western) tendency to view your parents’ projects as failures, so the children of those who began the work are now counting the ways it went wrong. But even more troubling to some is its success. “We were the opposition,” said Aleida. The movement developed in resistance to the dominant political culture; Willy Brandt was the great exception in postwar politics. Suddenly, in 1990, the project of working off was taken over by the state, beginning with Helmut Kohl, of all people, who had taken Reagan to the Bitburg cemetery to honor fallen members of the Waffen-SS just a few years earlier, and who claimed he did not need to think about Nazis thanks to “the mercy of a late birth.” But reunification, and the Western pressure that accompanied it, pushed Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union toward Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, at least in public. Anything taken over by a state is vulnerable to ritualization, leading to ceremonial pieties every politician is obliged to utter but no one is inclined to believe.
Now public rites of repentance are performed throughout the year: the liberation of Auschwitz is commemorated on January 27; the Warsaw ghetto uprising is remembered on whatever day in April coincides with the Jewish calendar’s Nisan 27; May 8 marks the end of the war; November 9, Kristallnacht. A standard ceremony includes two politicians, one Holocaust survivor, and a melancholy klezmer performance. The rites are predictable, formulaic, and boring. Much like American ceremonies marking Martin Luther King’s birthday, they do not feel very deep. Critics complain of forced and inauthentic identification with the victims of Nazi terror.
Aleida argues, however, for the need to create that empathy with the victims that was missing in Germany for decades after the war. Here she thinks literature and film were more important than ritual. In 1979, millions of Germans watched the television series Holocaust. However kitschy the Hollywood show may have seemed, its emotional impact was enormous, for behind the abstract concept “six million,” viewers finally glimpsed individual fates. “That series was for Germany what the Eichmann trial was for Israel,” said Aleida. Both were catalysts for public discussion of the Holocaust that had been missing for decades. She also argues that those who complain about state-imposed ceremony overlook hundreds of smaller efforts in communities all over the country, which gain little media attention. Civic and church groups remember their history in grassroots initiatives that work to root out the last traces of Nazi symbols, to commemorate the victims who disappeared from their towns.
I have heard many views about what has gone wrong with German working off. Volkhard Knigge argued that it was emotional rather than analytic: instead of focusing on the horror of the Holocaust, we need critical thinking about how it came to pass. Samuel Schidem argued that it had been too European: rather than focusing on the murder of one tribe, we need to fight universal tendencies to racism. Mariam Lau argued that it hadn’t been sufficiently personal: most people took refuge in abstract antifascist formulas rather than squarely facing up to their own crimes. My own view is that Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung has been too focused on victims in a world that is saturated with them. We’re far more likely to be inspired by admiration for heroes than by pity for victims. As John Brown wrote in 1851:
Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery. Witness the case of Cinque, of everlasting memory, on board the “Amistad.” The trial for life of one bold and to some extent successful man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three million of our submissive colored population. We need not mention the Greeks struggling against the oppressive Turks, the Poles against Russia, nor the Hungarians against Austria and Russia combined, to prove this.13
I can imagine a television series that would appeal, among others, to teenagers. Why not tell a story of a fifteen-year-old who slowly comes to befriend a refugee, and in doing so must challenge not only her classmates but her authoritarian, right-wing teacher? (What fifteen-year-old doesn’t want to defy a teacher?) If you’d like to produce it, you’re welcome to the idea.
The problems with Germany’s attempt to work off its past will probably only be resolved by responding to all the critiques and suggestions made above. Further thinking is also needed in view of the fact that 20 percent of its population now has an immigrant background. Currently, Germans are considering how to place the Holocaust in the center of its modern history for people whose grandparents had nothing to do with it. But despite some reasons for skepticism, the achievements are clear.
Nazi symbols, Holocaust denial, and hate speech, protected in America by the First Amendment, are illegal in Germany. The Washington Mall has a museum of the Holocaust, but no monument remembering American slavery and genocide. Would we object to Germans who acknowledged that the Holocaust was terrible—but built a monument commemorating American slavery in the center of Berlin? London’s Imperial War Museum has an exhibit about the Holocaust, but doesn’t bother to explore the violence committed in the name of Britain’s empire. Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum was meant to challenge Eurocentrism by showcasing non-European art and culture. There’s dark irony in the fact that many objects in its collection were stolen from colonized peoples, but the museum has already returned sacred objects to the Chugach people of Alaska, and more returns are certain to come. In the meantime, exhibits will display the short, violent history of German colonialism, including the massacre of the Herero, the first instance of twentieth-century genocide. The historical museum in The Hague is full of scenes showing prospering burghers, but when you reach the twentieth century, you find an exhibit about Dutch suffering during the war. There’s no reference to the fact that, thanks to Dutch collaboration with the Nazi occupation, a higher percentage of Jews were deported to concentration and death camps from Holland than from anywhere else in Europe.
I could multiply examples, but the point is surely clear: Germany’s attempts to work off its past have stumbled many times, but compared with the efforts of other countries, they are steps in the right direction. I share Aleida Assmann’s conviction that self-criticism is vital to the process of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. It’s a process that’s never likely to be finished or final, echoing Samuel Beckett’s adage: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
But if failing better is the best we can hope for, what’s the point of the attempt? If years of German working off have failed to uproot everyday racism or prevent the rise of the AfD, why bother with it at all? The past few decades have produced what’s been called an international cult of memory, which itself failed to remember that the slogan “Never forget!” can be an injunction to anything. If the right use of memory can be healing, the wrong use can be toxic. “Remember the Alamo!” was a war cry; the memory of France’s defeat by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War helped fuel World War I; Milosevic’s insistence that Serbians remember the 1389 defeat at Kosovo only led to further battles. The best students of memory know this well. Tzvetan Todorov wrote, “The memory of the past will serve no purpose if it is used to build an impassable wall between evil and us, identifying exclusively with irreproachable heroes and innocent victims and driving the agents of evil outside the confines of humankind. This, though, is precisely what we usually do.”14
Memory isn’t magic. The philosopher George Santayana’s famous warning—whoever fails to remember the past is condemned to repeat it—suggests that memory is an everlasting inoculation against past errors. We know this is false. Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell showed how many genocides took place after the world was reminded not to forget Auschwitz. The urge to remember can stoke grievance, encourage vengeance, power vendettas. The writer David Rieff recalled such examples in his book In Praise of Forgetting. The best case for his argument is probably Northern Ireland. Rieff described how negotiations between Republicans and Unionists shattered whenever a member of the IRA began to sing the old Fenian classic “The Rising of the Moon.” Hence Rieff quoted an Irishwoman who suggested that the next commemoration of Irish history should “raise a monument to Amnesia and forget where we put it.”15
Rieff’s argument turns on two important points. Memory is always partial, subjective, and political. This is true, but it needn’t lead to the conclusion he drew: because memory of the past is always selected to serve the present, it’s no better than propaganda. If history is an attempt to discover what actually happened, memory is an attempt to recover the experiences of it. At the very best they are complementary, but they should not be confused. We have no hard-and-fast criteria that determine when memory is a tool and when it is a weapon, when it is useful and when it’s abused. Then again, we have no hard-and-fast criteria for most important judgments. But we don’t need a concept of absolute truth in order to recognize lies. In the first decades after the war, Germans remembered nothing but their own suffering. Had they not been replaced by a combination of solid history and the memories of Germany’s victims, Germans’ memories of themselves as the war’s worst victims would have been not only false but dangerous. Southern memories of a noble Lost Cause are false, and they’re still dangerous today. Curiously, though Rieff’s discussion surveyed an impressive range of countries, it treated the German case only in passing.
The second strand of Rieff’s argument arises from political concerns about the ways in which justice can become the enemy of peace. Rieff rightly insisted that we attend to the world as it is; in a world that is not as it should be, many calls to remember have ended in tribal violence. Rieff allowed that if all were as wise as Avishai Margalit and Tzvetan Todorov, the dangers of manipulative memory would be slight, but, he concluded, “If history teaches us anything, it is that in politics as in war, human beings are not hard-wired for ambivalence.”16
Indeed we are not. Nor are we hardwired for nuance. Babies have neither, and children grasp both slowly. Learning to live with ambivalence, and to recognize nuance, may be the hardest part of growing up. But the difficulty of learning them is hardly a reason for ceasing to try.
Margalit, an Israeli philosopher, acknowledged the dangers of memory but argued that we have an absolute moral obligation to remember. The need to be alert to radical evil requires us to construct a moral memory that can be universally shared. “The source of the obligation to remember,” he wrote, “comes from the effort of radical evil forces to undermine morality itself by, among other means, rewriting the past and controlling collective memory.”17 Margalit’s claim was echoed and expanded by Margaret Urban Walker, who insisted that memory—and the acknowledgment of others’ memories—addresses not psychological but moral needs. Moral repair, she argued, is required to sustain moral relationships, which demand confidence in shared moral standards. When moral standards are violated, the community must reassert them, even if the wrongdoers themselves show no recognition of their crimes. To do otherwise is to leave the victim in what she called normative abandonment, and the rest of us prey to cynicism. Where some evils are acknowledged and others dismissed, it is easy to view justice as arbitrary—and ultimately merely a matter of power.
There may be as many ways to forget the past as there are to remember it. In the first decades after the war, the great majority of Germans followed Adenauer’s informal taboo: forget and be silent. After the Civil War, once federal troops withdrew, white American Southerners took the opposite direction: they made a lot of noise. The Lost Cause myth was deliberately constructed; from statues of Johnny Reb to developments in the burgeoning film industry, there was a concerted attempt to create a narrative that made Confederates look at least as virtuous, and a great deal more attractive, than the Yankees. The success of that effort makes it imperative to create a counterweight that’s just as deliberate. Although people should be punished for racist behavior, enforcing the law is not enough. We must change their attitudes, or at least their children’s, with conscious education on the scale that Germany undertook. As the failure of denazification showed, it cannot be imposed from outside, but outsiders have something to teach us, if only through their mistakes. Forgetting past evils may be initially safer, but in the long run, the dangers of forgetting are greater than the dangers of remembering—provided, of course, that we use the failures of past attempts to learn how to do it better.
America’s failure to face its past is evident not only in the vicious outbursts of white supremacy that Donald Trump encouraged, but in subtler ways as well. We saw that false memories of Reconstruction drive resistance to federal programs, such as Obamacare, that would serve everyone, not only in the South but in many parts of the country. By contrast, German efforts to confront its own crimes have made it a better country. Despite Germany’s tendency to paint itself black, it is a far more open, free—and yes, joyful—place than it was when I arrived there in 1982. It is also far more trusted, even occasionally admired, by the rest of the world. As late as 1990, much of the world was frightened by the prospect of a reunited Germany. Now many other nations ask Germany to play a more powerful role in world affairs, a request that would have seemed incredible just thirty years earlier.
There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany’s lead. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations’ media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world. Even Europeans, who are better served by their news media, can be surprised at the depth to which those outside the West suspect every appeal to Western values. They know just how often those values have been abused. Until we acknowledge the abuses, our moral authority will continue to recede, allowing critics to argue that any attempt to support universal values is just a smoke screen for violence and plunder. The Iraq War was only a recent example. The persistent weaknesses of the European Union rest in part on its inability to decide whether it stands for anything but the promotion of trade. Unfortunately, it’s exactly those progressive Europeans who would be expected to support the ideas of liberty, equality, and solidarity, born in the European Enlightenment, who are most inhibited by their knowledge of Europe’s colonial history. Britons who might have stopped Brexit with enthusiastic appeals to European values were unable to voice those values with anything like a whole heart. Conceptually, there’s an easy way out of the problem, which is to grant that Europe and the United States cultivated values they also repeatedly violated. But the violations must be acknowledged before the values can be reclaimed, and the actual work of acknowledgment will not be easy.
In an Alabama jail cell, Martin Luther King penned an open letter to fellow clergymen who dismissed his work as extremist. Among the many reasons why “Letter from Birmingham Jail” became a seminal text, one is surely the bluntness of its truths. King explained that he stood between two factions: those African Americans whom the long terror of segregation had made resigned and complacent, and those who “have lost faith in America … and have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil’ … whose bitterness … comes perilously close to advocating violence.” The statement was tactical; King was a political man. Yet he was not issuing a threat, but stating a fact: if we do not stand up for justice for its own sake, Americans will face another civil war. If “our white brothers … refuse to support our nonviolent efforts,” King continued, “millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.”18 At a time when Afro-pessimism has become a common watchword, King’s warning rings truer than ever. At a time when demographics show that America will cease to have a white majority within decades, we have all the more reason to heed it.
Understanding how the Germans are confronting their past cannot provide a recipe for confronting other historical evils, even were the German confrontation without flaw. Though I knew this in principle, I had to learn it in detail through writing this book. When I began, I meant to examine three countries. After Germany and the United States I chose Ireland, partly because it’s a place I’ve come to love, and know a little; partly because the Irish are proud to be the first country to wage a successful anticolonial struggle in the twentieth century. I spent the summer of 2016 visiting museums and theaters and lectures in much of the Republic of Ireland, surveying commemorations of the centennial of the Easter Rising, the founding event of Irish independence. I gave up the project when I realized it would require at least another book. Any real understanding of working-off-the-past demands enormous particularity: to understand what memory means to a nation, you need to study not only the details of its history but its culture as it’s lived today. That’s the only way to get a sense of the omnipresence of memory: the way it penetrates kindergartens, affects preferences for tea and for colors of clothing, determines what’s said out loud and what’s left as allusion, what counts as an insult and what’s taken as a compliment. And the omnipresence of memory is often complimented by the threat to put the past behind us, once and for all. Comparisons are interesting only when they convey the tone and texture of all these; otherwise they remain surface dives. Our experience is always tied to particular places and times. If we want to act morally, we cannot rest on general principle; we must attend to where we are. Even Kant, properly understood, knew that. This means there can never be one conceptual framework for dealing with every nation’s past crimes. We can learn from one another, but we cannot transfer principle without paying attention to difference.
If it is crucial to attend to empirical and historical differences in practice, it is possible to be universalist in principle. Few ideas today seem more suspect. On the left, universalism is regularly confused with its counterfeit. Critics point out that, from Enlightenment philosophers through the American Founding Fathers to the Kiplings of the nineteenth century, white men made claims to universality while ignoring the experience of most of the planet. It was the philosophers of the Enlightenment, however, who were the first to condemn Eurocentrism. Montesquieu wrote his critiques of European government from the (imagined) viewpoints of Persian observers; Christian Wolff lost his job, and very nearly his head, for arguing that the Chinese had perfectly good ethics though they had no Christianity; Diderot criticized European sexual mores from the perspective of Tahiti; Kant called colonialism evil, a word he used rarely; Rousseau complained that Europe knew nothing of the vast continent of Africa because its reports came from travelers “more interested in filling their pockets than their minds.” All these men—and they were all men—wrote of other nations, and genders, with a brevity and ignorance we now find appalling, but they were on the right track. Those philosophers made statements we are right to regard as racist and sexist; for all they tried to rise above them, they shared prejudices of their day. They remain necessary thinkers because they nevertheless built the foundations to destroy these prejudices—not only with abstract commitments to universal justice, but with their nascent attempts to address Eurocentrism by looking at Europe through other (albeit male) eyes.
If universalism is often dismissed in today’s academy, few outside are willing to defend it either. There are two historical reasons for this, and both revolve around the year 1989. After the collapse of state socialism, appeals to universal solidarity were associated with Stalinism. Ironically, in addition to his many other offenses, Stalin was deeply nationalist—the root of his battle with Trotsky, whom he erased from history with some success. Still, references to international solidarity were routinely invoked until the Soviet Union collapsed. Hardly anyone mourns the end of state socialism, but the idea of it served to expand our moral imagination. The now-common view that the rot that infected the Soviet Union dooms any attempt to create socialism has shrunk our imagination to a point where we can hardly envision more than mending the neoliberalism that replaced it.
The second reason follows from the first. Since the end of state socialism, the visible faces of universalism are the owners of Apple and Amazon and Facebook and other corporations hoping to imitate their success. The neoliberal, globalist ethos has nothing to do with universal values and everything to do with universal needs—however manipulatively they may be created. For neoliberals, universal human happiness is assured by the collection of stuff. The problem with neoliberalism is not only that its aversion to economic regulation has created a greater wealth gap than ever existed in modern times.19 The deeper philosophical problem is its view of human nature, revealed in neoliberal assumptions that economic growth is the single key to human happiness, though that’s rarely stated so baldly. Even those who may belong to the 1 percent know the meaning of life can’t be found in stockpiles of gadgets and baubles. Neoliberalism makes passive consumption rather than active engagement the fundamental human stance toward the world. Though I admired much of Obama’s presidency, his acceptance of neoliberalism proved a major flaw—not only because it resulted in bailing out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street but because it conflicted with his own philosophical ideals. Obama encouraged an active concept of human nature, urging his followers to civic engagement with slogans like “We are the change we’ve been waiting for.” In most of us there is a flame that makes us want to live righteously, to give something back to the world for the gift of having lived in it. For those born in a place where hunger and war are the rule, not the exception, it can shrink to a faded spark. But unless they are thoroughly undone by despair, human beings have a need to act in the world, leaving it better than they found it in some way.20 The worldview of neoliberalism, by contrast, treats us all, at bottom, as couch-centered, passive consumers.
This worldview has been supported in the last decades by the biological determinism encouraged by pseudoscientific versions of evolutionary psychology. To read an ordinary newspaper, you would think it’s just common sense to explain all human behavior by reference to our earliest ancestors’ attempts to reproduce themselves. Seldom is it asked what evidence we have for our ancestors’ motivations, or how much of what drove hunters and gatherers to action is relevant today. Biological determinism is so widely accepted—finally, a scientific explanation of human behavior!—that its premises are rarely questioned.
Finally and fatally, both neoliberalism and biological determinism are reinforced by post-structuralist assumptions about power. Like the early Sophists with whom Plato argued, they have done us a service by showing how many claims to truth are actually attempts at domination. But like those early Sophists, they leave us with the sense that every claim to truth is a matter of perspective and power. Some post-structuralists have recently countered the charge that, by undermining the concept of truth, they bear some responsibility for climate change denial or the thoroughgoing mendacity of the Trump administration. They reply that post-structuralism seeks to describe reality, not to orient it. But post-structuralism often obscures the line between descriptive and normative statements, imbuing much description with a faintly normative air. It cannot be surprising that less subtle readers hear their statements as prescriptions and conclude that if there are any facts at all, they are facts about domination.
Most of us know from our own lives that all three worldviews are false. Even social psychologists have shown that as soon as we cross the poverty line, our happiness does not consist in consumption; we often act from love or faith in ways that have nothing to do with the reproduction of our tribes; and we make and defend statements because we have good reasons to believe them. Not always, of course, but we have enough ordinary counterexamples to those worldviews to call them into question. It is hard to think of anyone who consistently acts according to those views—with perhaps one exception. Despite his views on economic issues like trade, Donald Trump embodies all three ideologies: his claims to truth are nothing but assertions of power, his values are all material values, and he appears to care about nothing so much as reproducing as many copies of himself, or at least of his name, as possible. Fortunately, the theories that describe the behavior of this singular man cannot be extended to the rest of humankind. Most of us are differently constructed—though the omnipresence of the reigning ideologies makes many embarrassed to express other values out loud.
If these beliefs are the reigning faces of universalism, is it any wonder that tribal identities have resurged? The reduction of universalism to globalism has been key to the revival of identity politics, whether white, brown, or black nationalism. In questioning identity politics, I am not endorsing Mark Lilla’s much discussed book, The Once and Future Liberal.21 That book was flawed by its failure to recognize the centrality of white identity politics for the Republican Party ever since Nixon concocted the Southern Strategy; white identity politics also fuel resurgent European nationalism. But Lilla was right to argue that identity politics can only be overcome by a conception of the common good, something that left-liberal focus on tribal identity has neglected to sustain. His description of similarities between the individualism that has dominated American culture since the Reagan era and the self-absorption of many appeals to identity politics is insightful. And though Lilla ignored the depth to which successful efforts by women, people of color, and LGBT activists have reshaped political culture, with very real consequences, he is surely right to insist on the importance of ordinary political acts like voting.
Much of what’s important in Lilla’s critique was preceded by Todd Gitlin and Richard Rorty, who both warned of the dangers of the tribalism that was already emerging on the left in the 1990s.22 It was Barack Obama’s ability to transcend those dangers by appealing to a common good that got him elected. To this date, no Democratic politician has been so successful in making the appeal believable, but other thinkers have opened doors for balancing difference with solidarity. Cornel West’s work exudes a love for black culture within a universalist framework that he views as a matter of humanity:
Blacks and whites are in some important ways alike, that is, in their positive capacities for human sympathy, moral sacrifice, service to others, intelligence and beauty, or negatively, in their capacity for cruelty. Yet the common humanity they share is jettisoned when the claim is cast in an assimilationist manner that subordinates black particularity to a false universalism.23
And Kwame Anthony Appiah’s powerful book The Lies That Bind argued that it is hopeless to explain why we are what we are by straightforward appeals to creed, country, color, class, and culture—collective identities that organize our lives. He concluded, “We live with seven billion fellow human beings on a small, warming planet. The cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity.”24
The citizenship ceremony I witnessed at the city hall of my neighborhood, Neukölln, worked hard to combine the cosmopolitan and the particular, beginning by acknowledging the power of national anthems. A violin-piano duet played a snippet of the anthem of each country from which the forty-eight new citizens came. Unlike her predecessor, the young district mayor Franziska Giffey deliberately encouraged diversity as she spoke of the twenty-two anthems the new citizens must have heard on the radio, in school, at a soccer game.
“Every time we do this I watch the faces to see if I can tell whose anthem is being played. Often I see people moved by memories of childhood, of loved ones.”
Of scattered trees and worn-down stone and far-off skies.
“Some of you were probably nervous on your way to this ceremony,” the mayor continued. “You may have even wondered about turning around and forgetting the whole thing.” Since qualifying for permanent residency is the first step to qualify for citizenship, none in the room need to fear deportation. In applying for citizenship they had taken a further step. “I want you to know that no one will take away your music, your memories, your old identities. You’re just receiving a new identity today.”
Each new citizen was called to the dais, where they received a copy of the constitution in exchange for taking an oath to uphold it. “You don’t have to memorize it,” said Mayor Giffey. “But the world would be a better place if everyone learned its first three articles:
“One: The dignity of the human being is inviolable.
“Two: Everyone has the right to the free development of their person so long as they do not harm the rights of others.
“Three: Everyone is equal before the law. The state supports the real equality of men and women and works to eliminate existing prejudices.”
After reading those passages, Mayor Giffey segued gracefully into one of the district’s problems. “When men and women have equal rights, it means that no woman can be forced to marry against her will.” The mayor concluded the ceremony with a call for civic engagement, before asking the assembled to sit still for the European anthem, and to rise for the German one. Staring at the backs of their programs, most of the new citizens made an effort to sing along before retreating to the foyer, where the mayor offered each one a piece of bread sprinkled with salt. Shortly after I watched her preside over the ceremony, Giffey’s political talents won national acclaim; she became a federal cabinet minister in 2018. More politicians like her would provide the kind of leadership that Germany, and Europe, sorely need.
“We have to remember that it’s absolutely new: never before did perpetrators take over the perspective of their victims,” Aleida Assmann reminded me. Since that shift of perspective is not only unprecedented but also at odds with our psychological need for approval, we can hardly expect it to go smoothly. Nietzsche wrote, “Memory says: I did that. Pride replies: I could not have done that. Eventually, memory yields.”25
Put less cryptically: Shame hurts. Guilt hurts. They are not emotions we willingly feel. We seek admiration from the outside and peace from within, and we have powerful ways to deflect everything that threatens them. Rather than acknowledging our complicity in something shameful, we forget with remarkable ease. That’s why memory is vital.
The burgeoning academic field called memory studies is mostly concerned with bad memories. It is crucial that the horror and shame we’re so eager to repress not be forgotten, but no community can be built on them alone. That’s the legitimate thought behind the demand to put the shameful past behind us that has accompanied German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung since its inception—and keeps other nations from embarking on a similar path. When memory becomes interchangeable with trauma, no country can hope to heal any wounds. We need ground to stand on before we can stand up to our own shame. As the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.”26 It’s impossible to work for further improvement if you believe things have never improved. Without sources of light in our history we cannot penetrate its darkness.
“I bring you greetings from the other America.” That’s how Harry Belafonte opened a concert at the GDR’s Palace of the Republic in 1983. Progressive Americans have always been able to appeal to an idea of another America, the home of those patriots who fought to force the country to be true to the ideals on which American pride was based. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B. Wells and Joe Hill, Eugene Debs and Mother Jones, Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie. All those names are known, if few have been memorialized as they deserve. Bryan Stevenson insists that we learn the names of the white Southerners who stood up to racism, even as he insists that Americans need to feel shame for our racist past before we can work to undo it.
German culture does not divide so neatly. Though it required a lot of editing, the Nazis did their best to incorporate cultural giants like Kant and Goethe into their pantheon. That can leave Germans seeking identities to fear that memory will lead to nothing but a boundless black hole. I have argued that Germany’s ability to face its Nazi past can be a source of self-respect. But it’s hard to be especially proud of cleaning up the unholy mess you made, even if the cleanup was a sign of the capacity for reflection that composed and sustained German culture.
The distinguished German writer Navid Kermani has urged that the strength and vitality of German identity be sought in its very brokenness.27 Kermani, whose Iranian parents immigrated to Köln just before he was born there, wrote that he felt most German when he went to Auschwitz. He often quotes Rabbi Nachmann: “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” It’s a thought that was reflected in the speech given by the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier on November 9, 2018—a date that was, among other things, the eightieth anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Among other things. November 9 has been called Germany’s day of fate, for an uncanny number of entirely unconnected historical events took place on that date. In the rush of excitement when the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989, many proposed to make it a national holiday—until someone pointed out that it could look as if Germans were celebrating Kristallnacht. For decades, the date has not been celebrated but mourned, for the pogrom that signaled the end of Jewish life in Germany.
In 2018, President Steinmeier took a bold new tack. Like dozens of politicians before him, Steinmeier began with a warning against forgetting November 9; unlike them, he reminded Germans to remember November 9, 1918—the end of imperial Germany and the beginning of republican democracy. His speech was a plea for “the ambivalence of memory,” urging the nation to live with its own contradictions. “We can be proud of the traditions of freedom and democracy without repressing the sight of the Shoah. We can be aware of our historical responsibility for fracturing civilization without denying ourselves the joy in what we’ve done well. We can trust this land although—or because—it contains both. That’s the core of enlightened patriotism.” Steinmeier’s speech was a masterful blend of pathos and nuance; how else could a politician urge his citizens to embrace ambivalence? Some critics predict the speech will prove as important as the epochal speech of his predecessor, Richard von Weiszäcker. If they are right, it will be one more thing that can be learned from the Germans.
For five years of my own life, I gave tribalism a try. Soon after the 1995 Oslo Accords, I moved to Israel, three children in tow. There were reasons enough to do so: Israeli friends in New Haven assured me I belonged in Tel Aviv, and the end of my first marriage made me hope to give my children the large extended family I thought the country would provide in place of the nuclear family I could no longer offer. There I discovered that tribalism becomes progressively narrower and narrower. (Just listen to Mizrachi and Ashkenazi Israelis talk about each other behind closed doors.) Tribal impulses go far beyond the mixture of resentment and contempt that Jews from Arab countries and Jews from Eastern Europe may express toward each other. When blood is the glue that holds people together, every single family becomes its own tribe.
Tribalism will always make your world smaller; universalism is the only way to expand it. My decision to leave Israel wasn’t directly political; the situation there in early 2000 was better than it had been in years. The country was still reeling from Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, and a majority was committed to continuing the peace process for which he died. Benjamin Netanyahu was viewed as a fool in disgrace. Though I left Israel before the second intifada, I make no claim to political foresight; I’d just realized that my relation to the world is not tribal. I was raised on the universalism of the early civil rights movement and educated in theories of justice by Rawls, and I have led an adult life most would call cosmopolitan. But influences are one thing, convictions another. In becoming an Israeli citizen, I tried out voting for tribalism with my feet. There I learned I could not possibly feel more connected to an arms dealer who shares my ethnic background than to a friend from Chile or South Africa or Kazakhstan who shares my basic values. My ties are to agents, not genealogies. I choose friends, and loves, for reasons.
I understand the longing for the stability and succor of an idea about home; I shared it for many years myself. Even when you know that home was never idyllic, its pull is very strong. Yet the sense of home will grow more elusive with every passing decade. Many thirty-year-olds are now imprinted with a far more fluid vision of the globe than I have. Genetics have shown that ethnic purity is largely mythical; most of us are more biologically cosmopolitan than we know.28 It isn’t just a matter of morality: historical changes and scientific discoveries give us every reason to embrace genuine universalism.
This book itself is offered as an exercise in universalism, in the hope that understanding difference will help us find shared souls. (Shared is not identical, even for twins.) To do so, we must reject the fear of everything that could be adjacent to kitsch—a fear that now underlies educated culture, which is far more comfortable with irony. Above all, we must acknowledge our shared vulnerability to the silliest banalities of evil, the tendency to put fame or fortune above what we truly believe and desire. That acknowledgment makes it possible to critically examine our own histories without tribalism or trauma. If we fail to understand that we have more in common than all that divides us, we cannot pursue what Toni Morrison called the human project: “to remain human and to block the dehumanization and estrangement of others.”29