Travel Notes from Pastor Stephen: Learning from Germans

Disclaimer: In this space and in the days that follow, I share my reflections — often stream of consciousness — after a day of experiences. These are not polished essays, but my in-the-moment thoughts. my reflections, and stream of consciousness after a day of experiences. This is not a polished essay, but my in the moment thoughts.

Courtney and I arrived in Berlin today and did a walking tour of two neighborhoods: one in East Berlin and one in West. We tried lots of food and discovered Berlin through locals’ eyes. We had great conversations including discussions about Learning from the Germans by Susan Neiman, the book Courtney and I read that serves as a sort of foundation to our trip. A copy of it is now in our church library, so I hope you’ll check it out.

Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil is an invitation to consider Germany’s reckoning with its past as a model for a much-needed, honest confrontation with the legacy of slavery and the persistent presence of racism in the United States. As a country, we are not done wrestling with our own past. We are fighting about how to understand that past, how we should talk about it (if at all), and what role it played and plays in our national identity. Current debates about Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, Policing, and Voter Rights remind us conversations and implications of race are not confined to US history.  They are very much a part of our present and will continue to be a part of our future.

Author Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum, an independent research center in Potsdam (just south of Berlin), and an advocate for a universalist approach to racism, which encourages a close look at the particularities of each case in order to draw moral conclusions with which both societies will be able to better face their own racism.

To research her book, Neiman read a variety of German writings from the postwar period: philosophy books, prisoner-of-war memoirs, and best-selling novels. She learned something that she’d never realized before: for a long time, everyday Germans didn’t feel bad about the Holocaust, or their country’s descent into Nazism. Instead, they made excuses for it and thought of themselves as innocent victims. She paraphrased the arguments: “Terrible things happen in war. It was bad for us, too. Our cities were destroyed. Our young men were murdered. We were occupied by foreign troops.” A Nazi brother or uncle was “just defending his homeland.”

As someone raised in the south this sounds like southern defending the South and championing the Lost Cause. Neiman makes that exact point again and again. She talked about how Germans talked just like Southern defenders of the Lost Cause mythology after WWII. “For twenty years they saw themselves as the war’s worst victims, refusing to admit any wrong.”

Neiman tells the story of trying to explain to a sweet-tempered sixty-ish man in Mississippi that the first generation of postwar Germans sounded exactly like the defenders of the Lost Cause version of Confederate history. “Surely they know — at the latest when they opened the camps — that what they’d done was pure evil?” he said. But they did not. Do you think the many slave owners in the south or those in the North that benefitted from slavery in a myriad of ways did? Primary sources seem to suggest most did not. Neiman says her book shows how Germans slowly worked to acknowledge the evils their nation committed, and how that journey should give us hope as Americans struggling to come to terms with our own divided history, which includes episodes of evil.

It’s a long journey to come to terms with such things. Courtney and I reflected the other day that our children are really the first generation in both of our families to not be raised with “Lost Cause” memory of southern secession. The Lost Cause is an historical memory/myth that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, writes in his book In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History that the Lost Cause myopia “allowed generations of white southerners to deny the acts of indecency and inhumanity perpetrated on black people.”

I certainly grew up with the Lost Cause myth permeating the culture around me. It’s why a Confederate flag continued to fly above the statehouse, the seat of government, throughout my childhood and youth. It’s why even today there is such dismay at renaming streets and buildings, and taking down statues meant to glorify these heroes of the Lost Cause.

“We would be outraged in the US if, within Germany, you would see statues of Nazi soldiers, with people claiming, ‘They were just my ancestors fighting for my homeland,’” Neiman said. “It’s actually what both descendants of Nazis and of Confederates believed, but it’s highly problematic to fight for your homeland and forget the ideology that started the war.”

While the South has its own myth, don’t think the rest of the country is living without its own myths about the war. Often Northerners think they were all fighting to preserve the Union and free slaves, forgetting the draft riots and the hateful rhetoric and scorn most abolitionists in the North faced. Racism and mythic memories are not a Southern phenomenon. The whole country needs to reckon with our history: from our treatment of Native Americas to Black Americans, to immigrants, and more.

Neiman’s book details the long and arduous road to German culture’s reckoning—first through civil society activism and later with state recognition and support—with its murderous past, as a model for the US to face its murderous past and present without claiming that the two — the Holocaust and US slavery and racial discrimination — are historically the same. I think we are all tired of comparing everything under the sun to Nazism and the Holocaust. We can learn from another’s country’s challenging past without claiming we have identical or even parallel paths.

One of the most repeated commands in the Bible is to remember. God commands the Israelites to remember when they were slaves in Egypt and how God liberated them. Jesus commands us to remember him when we break bread and share the cup. The Bible is full of stories to help us remember who we are and who God has called us to be. Memory is key to personal, national, and religious identity, but memory is also fickle and easily manipulated. Neiman’s book has given me an opportunity to think more deeply about memory work and its power to heal as well as to divide societies.

For the first section of her book “German Lessons,” Neiman interviewed people who were central in building what became the celebrated memory culture in Germany: historians, philosophers, directors of memorial educational centers (like former concentration camps), journalists, academics, and activists, among others. In the early days of the Bundesrepublik, Neiman argues that Adenauer’s (the first Chancellor) politics built a democracy without a democratic culture. Nazis went back to life unpunished, and nobody spoke in the name of the victims. No one wanted to remember, they wanted to move on. That’s often how it is for individuals, communities, and nations. We argue that we shouldn’t dwell in the past, and we should not. But we cannot move forward together, wholly, properly, without first confronting and reckoning with our past.

Neiman reminds us that people want to believe that they are not racist, that they are past race (and quite a few of those also that we are past the feminist revolution). Things are more complicated than that, and Neiman’s book helps us unpack those complexities in engaging and productive ways. We can’t just jump to claiming we are post-racial, post-gendering, post-nationalistic society and pretend we live in a land with liberty and justice for all, nor can we live with a historical memory that this has ever described the US. It’s a vision, not a reality.

Neiman celebrates Germans’ shift of focus from the suffering Germans experienced to the suffering they created. This is indeed essential in moving beyond self-victimization. Competitive victimhood is universal, Neiman claims. You can hear the same complaints among the defeated south after the civil war, and the Germans post WWII about the loss of brave sons, destruction of homes, the abusive occupying forces, and the ensuing poverty and hunger. Neiman asks, “If Germany could come to shift its focus from the suffering it experienced to the suffering it created, what’s to prevent any other nation from doing the same?”

Do we see competing victimhood in the US? Have you ever found a group who has historically been the perpetrators of violence, discrimination, and injustice claim current or historic victimhood? Sometimes we play the victim card to deflect and distract from our own culpability, but then we never honestly reckon with our past with keeps us from reconciling with it and one another.

If we are supposed to learn from Germans, then an appropriate question to ask is, “Did Germans learn from Germans?”

In chapter 3 (“Cold War Memories”) Neiman lists the criteria by which “nations” can be judged to have successfully attempted to work through their past. First, the nation must have a coherent and widely accepted national narrative, which is true in democratic and non-democratic regimes. These narratives start with words, reinforced by symbols, and are transported through education.

Neiman argues that both the West German government and the US State Department were ambivalent about whether Nazis and the legacy of slavery were bad, respectively. Second, these national narratives must be reinforced by symbols; Neiman claims that there are no monuments for Nazis. It is true that one cannot find a public monument in contemporary Germany that celebrates Nazis as Nazis. There are, however, monuments for Wehrmacht soldiers all around Germany, and for Nazi perpetrators listing their achievements without reference to their past, and many monuments that commemorate the dead of the First and Second World Wars together, without reference to the different regimes those wars were fought by and under. Such monuments have been debated, sometimes and in some places, while in others, plaques and monuments that celebrate Nazi achievements stayed in place. It is not unlike the situation in America and the debates about statues of Confederate generals or monuments to leaders who had great achievements but also questionable and problematic histories. The content and resolution of these debates have been extremely varied.

There are reminders everywhere in Berlin of the atrocities of Nazism. Monuments of remembrance are ubiquitous. The city has at least 20 memorials to victims of the Holocaust – most notably Peter Eisenman’s vast Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that we will see tomorrow. The city doesn’t want its people or the world to forget. It stares you in the face in the architecture, holding painful memories, and in the museums and memorials, but in the small places too, like a little plaque on a wall that memorializes another somber, painful, and shameful ghost of the past or some of the Stumbling Stones found throughout Germany.

Known as “Stolpersteine” in Germany there are now more than 90,000 such memorial blocks laid in more than 1,200 cities and towns across Europe and Russia. It is the largest de-centralized memorial in the world. Each Stumbling Stone commemorates a victim outside their last-known freely chosen residence or workplace. They are everywhere and it’s a sobering symbol of what happened and what was lost.

But word symbols are not the only part of the narrative. There has to be action, such as perpetrators being brought to justice and restitution being made to victims of injustice. West German justice only prosecuted a small number of Nazis and often commuted their sentences. East Germany convicted many more in part because of how anti-Fascist the Communists were. Both countries paid reparations, in different ways, for crimes committed while the Nazis were in power. West Germany offered no federal funding for the preservation or support of any concentration camp memorial until reunification, so it’s a very recent thing for the German government to support this work. Again, it shows that it is a process and it takes time, but once it starts, things can happen quickly.

In the US, it took decades to bring the murderers in the most famous civil rights cases to trial and many never were arraigned or convicted. Many in the US, especially black Americans, feel justice has not been done for many recent victims of what they believe are racially motivated crimes. We now have a memorial to victims of lynching in Montgomery, and a Black History Museum in DC, both of which are relatively recent additions to our national landscape. There is hope and there is progress. Working off the past and confronting it and being convicted and converted by it takes time, but we should not give excuses for its delay either.

The second part, “Southern Discomfort” focuses on racial violence, and ideologies that permitted and promoted structural and legalized discrimination after the Civil War. In chapter 4, “Everybody Knows about Mississippi,” Neiman helpfully decodes the chilling presence of loyalty to white supremacy and its iconography at the University of Mississippi. Too often, racism is seen as a “southern problem,” but I want to make sure we don’t think of it that way. I’ve lived in the south, the midwest, the northeast, and now the mid-Atlantic. I’ve seen racism everywhere. The Midwest was really bad, and it’s clear central PA is not immune. Our local school districts are currently embroiled in controversies around racism.

While it’s true that Mississippi was called the lynching capital of the world not all that long ago, it’s also true that Mississippi and other southern states were largely left on their own following the Civil War because the rest of the country didn’t want to engage the challenges and problems there and their own complicity and contribution to those problems.

Neiman has trouble reconciling the idea of southern hospitality with southern brutality. I’ve come to know both. Southerners can be some of the kindest, gentlest, sweetest people you’ll meet, but also some of the most stubborn, narrow-minded, and vicious. And I’m not talking about two separate groups: those qualities exist in the same people.

Neiman writes, “It’s impossible to reconcile that sense of gentleness with the knowledge that more people were lynched here (Mississippi) than anywhere else in the country, and lynch is a word that hides more than it shows. They were hacked to pieces, burned to death slowly, fingers and teeth sold as souvenirs to the mobs who drove for miles to witness and jeer. Mississippians’ beloved Jesus, mocked as he hung dying, did not suffer more.”

It reminds me again that we are all a mixture of sinner and saint. History is full of people who are simultaneously heroes and villains, who have done great good and great evil. I don’t think anyone is fully evil, but neither is any fully good. I just hope and pray and I can live my life more toward the good, but I’m not naïve enough to believe I will be free of all evil, whether through participation, complicity, or just standing by and letting evil have its day. Lots of people in Mississippi participated in lynchings, while others watched, others allowed it to happen, and others just kept their heads down and stayed silent.

Neiman talks about challenging processes at the University of Mississippi around renaming buildings, removing plaques, etc. When is it appropriate to rename and remove and when is it most appropriate to recontextualize? These are not easy questions and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. These debates are happening around the country and happened in Germany. Some symbols and names remain and some do not. Some are changed and some are not; context is important. How easily can something be recontextualized to teach and to provide information and not just praise or support?

I remember asking a similar question in South Africa to a leader of the anti-apartheid movement in relation to Kruger National Park. I asked if she would want the name changed since Paul Kruger was a politician with a complicated history when it comes to Africa and race relations. She responded she did not want it changed because she wanted people to remember Kruger and what he did, not to praise him, to remember the evil and learn from it. But there are examples of statues she did want taken down and places renamed. It’s a difficult and challenging process.

But it’s an important process and one that is part of working off the past. Neiman interviewed Robert Lee Long, editor of a paper in a small Mississippi town. He argued that it wasn’t just the blood and agony of those who fought for civil rights that changed Mississippi. He says Mississippi had to change itself. “Believe it or not, it was Nixon’s silent majority that had to have a soul-searching moment and say ‘You know what? Racism is wrong. I have been wrong. I’ve got to change.’” He goes on to say that atonement begins with acknowledging history so we won’t make the same mistakes again, but contribute to the world in good and beautiful ways. 

In the same chapter, there is a helpful discussion about integrated public education and how the state continues to undermine it. Apparently, the same is true today in the Kreuzberg and Neukölln sections of Berlin, where the local press recognizes that schools remain segregated despite plans to “integrate” them, and the likelihood that a child whose parents were migrants, or poor, will attend a gymnasium and pursue higher education is slim. For all of America’s efforts to “integrate” schools, many schools are still very racially divided, especially in larger cities. There are many reasons for this, including historic practices such as redlining.

Chapter 5, “Lost Causes,” engages powerfully with activists and academics as well as middle-of the-road citizens, history teachers, and family members reenacting the Confederate side of the Civil War. I am very familiar with this because in my childhood I was around re-enactors and those who championed the “Lost Cause” ideology through groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Daughters of the Confederacy, and more. More than one of my friends had confederate flags on their cars or as bumper stickers.

Neiman talks about Stone Mountain, just a bit outside of Atlanta, that was planned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They had hoped to create something much larger with thousands of Confederate soldiers marching across the mountainside. No one seemed to mind that visual in 1915. After all, it was the same year the KKK had a late-night party on the top of the Mountain and celebrated the lynching of a Jewish man named Leo Frank. And don’t think it was just the south that was okay with the planned memorial. The rest of the country was fine with it, too, because it was called a monument of reconciliation.

Neiman writes, “If you find the word reconciliation an odd way to describe triumphalist sculptures, you’ve forgotten that reconciliation between white and black folk wasn’t on the agenda. Reconciliation between white members of the opposing armies was to be achieved by valorizing the defeated and ignoring the cause for which they’d fought.”

Funding problems left stone mountain with just the head of Robert E. Lee and his horse. The monument was left unfinished until it was picked up again in the 1960s (around the same time the Confederate flag was put on top of the SC statehouse) to portray three Confederate generals. You could say the renewed interest was due to the centennial of the war, but the renewal also came right on the heels of Brown v. Board of Education.

The monuments that are now being debated were largely raised after the Civil war in an organized and concerted effort to change the narrative and absolve the south of much guilt, through the Lost Cause myth. The narrative was revived in the 1970s by historians who pushed the idea the Civil War was more of an economic conflict than a war fought for ideas and principles.

Most Southerners today will agree that slavery was wrong, but the word evil is rarely used. Most southerners want to jump from Emancipation to one big happy American family and forget that anything happened between Emancipation and today that would hurt race relations.

What is also interesting to me is how southerners have framed and surrounded this Lost Cause ethos in religious language and meaning. Neiman writes:

Seeking meaning in suffering, Lost Cause theologians conceived the South as a nineteenth-century Jesus, innocent and martyred but destined to rise again. The pilgrimage to the past is a form of reassurance and prayer: that our sins will be redeemed if we present them with a dollop of remorse in a sea of innocence. The ritual combines pagan ancestor worship with Christian sacralization of suffering. There’s even a faint smell of theodicy.

How does that theodicy work? Well Christians often say (wrongly, I’d add) that “everything happens for a reason.” The 17^th century German philosopher Leibniz said it first, but that’s not the point. What we see and hear in the South is that many good things came from slavery (new forms of music, the fact their descendants live in the best nation on Earth, etc) so could slavery be that bad, or did God have a larger purpose with American Slavery?

I’ve heard that for years. It’s a dangerous and misguided theological road to walk, but it’s a well-travelled path. We are quick to rationalize our mistakes and our suffering with some God decreed blessing to make it all okay.

In many ways, the segregated South was, as Diane McWhorter claims, a totalitarian society in which every aspect of life was organized around race and is comparable to the recognition Germans came to that their parents and grandparents were part of a totalitarian society. Yet the consequences of this realization are different—in the South those who work against historical segregation fight discrimination today. In Germany, it’s been argued that few of those working in Holocaust education also work for the inclusion of minorities in civic education projects and in society at large. This has only recently changed after the recent rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany and attacks on Jews, migrants, and other minority groups. German press and political elite have begun to address right radicalism and racism as a “poison” to the German society.

Neiman critically discusses emotional engagement with the past in both Germany and the US. People from the Mississippi Delta express their love for the place, and Neiman rightly and forcefully unpacks this love, its harshness as well as its history. She is careful to voice the skepticism of her German counterparts when she informs them that she is writing a book about Germany’s coming to terms with the past as a success story. Is Germany really post-facist, post-racist? Is America post racial? Or are we still on a journey, better than we were but not where we should be?

Neiman writes, “No one in Germany denies there’s more work to be done…. Good Germans are ever on the watch for signs of resurgent racism. They view those developments with gloom and expect that worse will follow.”

Germany is pretty quick to condemn Anti-Semitism and racism with more than words. I’m not sure the US keeps up with that same pace, at least not recently. I hear often from people that racism really isn’t an issue anymore, but actions speak louder than words.

Chapter 6 is all about the Emmitt Till case and there is so much there to unpack, but I don’t think I want to at this time and place as my focus is less on the South and more on Germany. There are of course intersections, but I want to have time to discuss the third section of Neiman’s book and this reflection is already way too long.

I was particularly intrigued by Neiman’s conversation with Bryan Stevenson in chapter 7 (Monumental Recognition) of the third section of the book (Setting Things Straight).  Stevenson wrote the book “Just Mercy” that some of our small groups have read at Derry. Stevenson is a civil rights lawyer who funded the Equal Justice Initiative which has saved hundreds of prisoners from execution, and who created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, also known as the National Lynching Memorial. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is the first national memorial to Black victims of lynching. Its purpose is to provoke a confrontation with the United States’ racial past, in the hope that truth will lead to racial justice. 

Stevenson took Germany’s confrontation with its past as a model. Stevenson says the difference between Germany and the US is leadership. He argues that there were people in Germany who said, “We can choose to be a Germany of the past or a Germany of the future. We cannot do it by trying to reconcile the Nazi era with what we want to be. Either we’re going to reject that and claim something better or we’re going to be condemned by that for the rest of our existence.”

The US has not had the honest conversation or that conscious decision. I think in part because many Americans want to believe in American exceptionalism which makes it hard to say the country was not only wrong but participated in evil in its past. Americans want to think we’re the greatest nation, and great nations don’t do evil things, therefore America hasn’t done evil and has nothing to confess and repent. It’s faulty logic, but when has that ever stopped us in the past, or present for that matter?

According to Stevenson, what is missing in America is shame: there is a consensus that slavery was wrong, but even among families descending from slave owners, it is hard to find shame — even if one can detect regret or remorse. He says, “Without shame, you don’t actually correct. You don’t do things differently. You don’t acknowledge…. Shame…is what you feel when you see yourself reflected through others’ eyes and you cannot bear to let that image stand. To overcome shame, you must actually do something to show others you are not inevitably caught in your, or your forebears’, worst moments.”

Something I hadn’t considered before was the fact that we have Holocaust Memorials throughout this country including one in Washington DC. There was even one in Peoria, IL. It’s even more puzzling when you consider how little the US did to help save Jewish people when we had the chance before the war, like refusing Jewish refugees’ entrance. What’s even worse was how easily we admitted former Nazis into the US after the war. Yet we have these memorials in prominent spaces in our country. I’d say they were to remind us of our own shame but since our part in it is rarely taught or lifted up, I can’t really make that claim.  

We have Holocaust memorials for something that happened in Europe but we don’t have a memorial to the victims of slavery, despite millions dying in captivity or on the inhumane Middle Passage journey. We don’t have a national memorial remembering the systemic eradication and removal of native populations and culture. And this isn’t about which was worse. Evil isn’t a competition. As Neiman says, “It’s about comparative redemption, not comparative evil.” It’s not about comparing slavery or the Indian Removal Acts, or Jim Crow or Japanese Internment with the Holocaust or the Soviet Gulags. It’s about naming evil, remembering it, and working off our history so we can do better. It appears easier to work off other nations’ histories. It’s more comfortable anyway, but I wonder…. what would we think if there was a Memorial to Enslaved Persons in Berlin that remembered the crimes of America? Would that bring us shame? Do you think we have much shame in America for our past, even as we demand it from countries like Germany?

Neiman writes that we must insist that “shame can be the first step toward responsibility, and with that, toward genuine national pride.”

Neiman asks Ingo Schulze, a renowned German author, what we can learn from the German experience.  He answers:

To look at your own country as if it were a foreign one. It’s crucial to have a broken relationship to your past, to be ready to see your own history with shame and horror. Germany didn’t do it willingly. It’s still not completed. Even today we have problems thinking about the cruelties of our colonial history.

But shame and negative feelings can take a society forward only to an extent. In can’t be missing; we can’t stop teaching history because it might make someone feel bad. Yet, shame can’t be the main pedagogical driver because it will inevitably create further resistance to engaging with the material. Whether right or wrong, it’s a reality we have seen already here in the US when it comes to teaching on race. 

Neiman tells of the need for conversion through the story of Tallahatchie, Mississippi, a place that eventually understood the need to have a plaque explaining the brutal murder of a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, by two local white men in 1955 who were acquitted at trial. Both later confessed to the murder in a magazine interview. Neiman interviewed family members of the murdered child, activists, and educators working in light of his murder as well as the son of the defense attorney who got them acquitted. These conversations show that indeed, the son of a white supremacist holds views that are similar to those held by his racist father, as he claims in a self-contradictory manner that Till’s murder happened elsewhere, not in his town. When we cannot honestly confront our past, we create false memories. This has been shown in trauma victims, as well. Perhaps we are often victims of our own trauma inducing actions when we cannot confront what we have done, been complicit in, or was silent about.

There’s an episode of Doctor Who in which passengers on a space ship, if they choose, can learn the difficult truth about the ship. Only those who search and who press past the simple answers ever have the opportunity, but once they learn the truth they can choose to forget it. It’s too traumatic to know the truth and realize they’ve been a part of it all along. They choose to forget. We often don’t want to be confronted, convicted, and converted by our pasts or our presents.

In Learning from Germans, Neiman works in and between her two “home” cultures (the US and Germany), we learn from her honest comments how those encounters were often scary, revolting, or elating. In a particularly powerful statement that can be taught in history, sociology, and anthropology classes, Neiman claims that “you cannot hope to understand another culture until you try to get inside a piece of it and walk around there for a while. You know you’ll never get it in a way that someone who was born inside it does.” This humility and curiosity to enter a culture cautiously not in order to glorify or condemn, not even in order to become one and the same, but to try to understand, is often missing our discussions of Nazi legacies, of apartheid in South Africa, the Troubles in Ireland, of American slavery and neo-slavery, and countless other parts of our American past. We have to understand that even our own past represents a culture different from our own and we have to enter into it with humility, curiosity, and a willingness to be confronted, convicted, and converted.

In chapter 9, “In Place of Conclusions,” Neiman claims that we “can learn from one another but we cannot transfer principle without paying attention to difference.” We need to learn from each other, continually, and pay attention to the groups and voices at work in defining what we talk about when we talk about racism, in light of the memory and presence of evil.

Okay, so that’s the book in a very small nutshell…. but what’s the lesson for us?

I think the lesson for Americans, especially those who want to be involved in the work of reconciliation is that “Nobody wants to look at the dark sides of their history,” as Neiman says. “It’s like finding out that your parents did something really horrible. There’s always going to be resistance. It’s normal, and it’s something we should expect.”

So what made the Germans change? Neiman writes about a number of historical factors, but the most important, in her opinion, was “civil engagement” by the German public, beginning in the 1960s. A new generation came of age. “They realized that their parents and teachers had been Nazis, or at least complicit in Nazi atrocities, and were outraged,” she said. A small and often controversial vanguard insisted on digging up history that older generations had refused to discuss. People called them Nestbeschmützer, or “nest-foulers.” But the process they set in motion—a process of uncovering the past and talking about it—eventually reverberated throughout German society.

So what might that look like here? Neiman suggests that any attempt at Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (a German word that basically means “working off the past” or “reckoning with the past”) must be “multifaceted.” It can’t be imposed from without, but most come from within, from the people. It can’t be confined to schools or museums. “Otherwise it’s boring, and it takes on the character of propaganda.” Germans don’t learn about the Holocaust in just one way. “You really can’t escape it,” she said. “It’s in art works, in literature, in movies, in television, done in different keys and in different registers. There’s no one message.”

Similarly, it can’t just be legislated from the top down. “It needs to be local, spurred by citizen engagement,” she said. It needs to be grassroots and interactive and as a culture we need to think about what practices we may need to stop, amend, or reframe. The Stumbling Stones are a great example.  One example Neiman shares is the fashionable practice of white Americans still getting married at southern plantations. Germans would probably view with this horror. “After all, plantations were concentration camps for black people,” Neiman said.

Lastly, we need to have balance. I try to practice balance in most things. I’m not always successful, but swinging the pendulum too far one way after another does not bring lasting change or stability.

In an interview with the New Yorker, Neiman speaks to complaints about Times’  1619 Project: that focusing on the worst parts of a nation’s history is depressing and, worse, delegitimizing. “They complained about it in Germany as much as Newt Gingrich and company are complaining about it now—‘It’s going to tear the social fabric, and we won’t have a national identity anymore! People won’t have anything to celebrate!’ ” There’s some truth there, she said. When planning monuments, “I think it’s really important that it not just be sites of horror, that we also remember heroes.”

We can’t grow and do better as a nation by studying it through a largely negative lens. We can’t ignore it either. We need something to celebrate that inspires us.

Neiman uses the analogy that having a grownup relationship to your (or your nation’s) history is like having a grownup relationship to your parents. As a kid, you believe everything they tell you. As an adolescent, you may be inclined to reject everything. But as a grownup you begin to understand why your parents did what they did even if you didn’t always agree. You are able to be thankful for so much of the good you may have even taken for granted for the majority of your life and address the negative and perhaps even forgive the hurts that need to be forgiven.

No parent is perfect. I’ve come to accept that in some way I will screw up my kids, but I hope I get it right sometimes too, and that in the end my children will be able to make their own way better than I ever did. I hope I have a relationship with my kids as adults that allows them to question me, thank me, love me, challenge me, and remember my mistakes as well as my parental triumphs and not just pretend I was ever the perfect parent because that won’t help them be better parents, or me be a better grandparent and man. 

As a nation we need that kind of relationship with our history. We need to be able to question how our history is packaged for us, but we also need to be able to reject parts that need to be rejected, forgive what needs to be forgiven, repair what is broken, make amends for damage and pain, celebrate what is great, and be grateful for what is has provided. Perhaps we can learn from the Germans.

Read more Berlin travel notes:

Why Berlin? (4/16/23)