More than a century and a half after the Civil War, America still hasn’t faced the full truth of what caused that catastrophe or what came after it. Many Americans still believe in the myth of the Lost Cause, a rewritten history in which a noble, innocent South valiantly defended itself against invaders from the North. In this fiction, slaveholders became the victims. Racism — often vicious and violent — remained widespread after the Civil War, not just in the South but across the nation. And to this day, few Americans learn the full truth of our history.
Something very similar happened in Germany after World War 2. Long after the concentration camps had been liberated and it became impossible to deny the horror of the Holocaust, many Germans saw themselves as the victims of the war. Few faced the truth about their past, and instead the nation as a whole chose to embrace a rewritten, fictional version, and “just move on.”
It may be hard for many Americans to imagine, but there are striking parallels between post-Civil-War America and post-World-War-2 Germany. Spencer’s guest this time is an expert on those parallels, and wrote a deeply-researched, insightful, and important book about them. Philosopher Susan Neiman is the author of Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.
Susan Neiman grew up in the American south, but has spent many years in Germany and is now the director of the Berlin-based Einstein Forum. In Learning From the Germans, she describes how Germans finally began what they call vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, or “working off the past.” It has helped Germany both to make atonement, and to build a better society. As America begins facing its own forgotten, buried, or rewritten past, we can learn a lot from this book and its author.
About Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität Berlin, and was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Evil in Modern Thought, Fremde sehen anders, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, Why Grow Up?, Widerstand der Vernunft: Ein Manifest in postfaktischen Zeiten and Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.
Links
Mentioned in this episode:
Susan Neiman website
Learning From the Germans
Wehrmacht Exhibition (Wikipedia)
Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative
Emmett Till (Wikipedia)
How the South Won the Civil War, by Heather Cox Richardson
“Forgetting Hiroshima, remembering Auschwitz: Tales of two exhibits,” by Susan Neiman (PDF)