Slavery and the Holocaust: How Americans and Germans Cope With Past Evils

What can be compared to the Holocaust? Everything? Detention camps on America’s border? Nothing? This history war, generally the province of academics, has recently become part of American political discourse.

Into this discussion comes Susan Neiman’s “Learning From the Germans.” Neiman, who has lived in Germany for much of her adult life, and who directs Berlin’s Einstein Forum, contrasts Germany’s response to the Holocaust with America’s response to slavery and centuries of racial discrimination. Her concern is not “comparative evil” — which event is worse — but “comparative redemption,” how each community has responded to and reframed the memory of its unsavory past. Neiman contends that postwar Germany, after initially stumbling badly, has done the hard work necessary to grapple with and come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust in a way that could be a lesson to America in general, and the American South in particular.

For two decades after World War II, Germany — East and West – practiced “moral myopia.” Communist East Germany claimed that since it was a postwar antifascist state and all the former Nazis were in West Germany (they were not), it bore no responsibility for genocide. West Germans, in Neiman’s words, “from dogcatcher to diplomat,” falsely insisted that only the Third Reich’s leadership knew of the mass murder. “Our men were gallant fighters, not criminals,” one German told her. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer appointed former Nazis to some of the government’s highest jobs, thus telegraphing the message that, on a personal level, all was forgiven. Even the reparation process, Neiman says, was “meanspirited and arduous.” Auschwitz survivors received a smaller pension than former SS guards and their widows. Simply put, Germans, East and West, refused to articulate the words: I was guilty.

What changed? In the late 1960s West German children and grandchildren of Nazis began to struggle with their families’ crimes. Having watched the televised Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, and inspired by student protests sweeping Europe, young Germans demanded an honest account of past wrongs. That confrontation with history, while hardly complete and now under attack from right-wing forces, remains far more extensive and honest, Neiman says, than anything that occurred in the United States regarding slavery and discrimination.

Born and raised in the South, Neiman moved from Berlin to Mississippi to research this fascinating book. She actively sought people and institutions engaged in “remembering.” She found eerie similarities between the response of the first generations of postwar Germans to their evil past and the response of many Americans, particularly Southerners, to theirs. Many of her Southern informants echoed Germany’s post-World War II mantra. Nobody was in the slave business. Southerners just bought what Northern ship captains sold them. Slavery was unconnected to the Civil War. The conflict was all about taxes.

Neiman notes that while Germany’s past no longer immunizes it against resurgent nationalism and anti-Semitism, there is in the heart of Berlin a memorial to the six million Jews murdered by Germans. “A nation that erects a monument of shame for the evils of its history in its most prominent space is a nation that is not afraid to confront its own failures.” While a museum dedicated to the African-American experience has opened in the heart of Washington, recent expressions of racism not just from the highest office in this land but also from many politicians, pundits and ordinary people suggest that America’s confrontation with its legacy of slavery and racial hatred is far from complete.

Many Americans, in the South and the North, insist that Confederate monuments are historical artifacts that simply honor the region’s history and its loyal defenders. They ignore the fact that most were built 50 years after the war, when the children of the Confederacy were creating the myth of a noble lost cause. Others were erected during the 1960s in protest of the civil rights movement.

Rather than “innocuous shrines of history” protected, in the words of President Trump, by “nice people,” they are “provocative assertions of white supremacy” built when its defenders felt threatened. They lionize men who fought for the right to buy, sell and bequeath human beings. Those who insist that the Civil War was about states’ rights are dismissed by Neiman with a simple query: “states’ rights to do what?”

Initially skeptical about the viability of reparations, Neiman says her views have evolved. She considers reparations a repayment for a debt, not just for slavery but for the century of “neo-slavery” that followed it in the form of sharecropping, a kind of agricultural servitude that left black families mired in debt to the descendants of those who once enslaved them. Along with sharecropping there were both Jim Crow laws, many of which influenced Nazi anti-Semitic legislation, and redlining by financial institutions. All these continue to leave generations of African-Americans at a decided disadvantage.

Neiman believes that people who live in a society built on injustice, even though they may not have created the injustice, are responsible for correcting it. The moral precedent for American reparations to its black citizens is rooted in Germany’s post-World War II compensation for its past crimes. If one believes German reparations were justified, how can one oppose them in America?

Though Neiman supports reparations, she rejects the notion of cultural appropriation, the attack on “outsiders” — artists, writers and performers — who try to get “inside” the experiences of a persecuted group. “African-American history in all its torment and glory is American history. … You cannot hope to understand another culture until you try to get inside a piece of it and walk around there for a while.” She acknowledges that “you’ll never get it the way someone who was born inside it does,” but you’ll never understand their pain and your part in causing it unless you try. “I know,” she writes, “of nothing more moving than Paul Robeson’s rendering of the ‘Partisan Lied,’ written in Yiddish as response to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. And the fact that he sang it in 1949 in Moscow, as Stalin’s anti-Semitism began to sweep the Soviet Union, shows he knew exactly how to use it.”

Neiman spent three years interviewing people in both Germany and the United States in preparation for writing this book. Despite her having insisted that her project was not about comparative evil but how evil is remembered, Germans almost uniformly rejected any suggestion of a comparison. They considered what they did far worse than slavery. Americans also uniformly rejected the comparison, but for different reasons. Convinced that slavery was not nearly as serious a blot on their country’s history as the Holocaust was on Germany’s, Americans use that fact as a means of blinding themselves to its horrors. In that contrast there is, Neiman suggests, a lesson about confronting the past.

Optimally, a reviewer’s evaluation should not be influenced by where she read a book. But this book accompanied me while I was in Poland, meeting with Polish academics, museum personnel and dedicated individuals who, at immense personal risk, are fighting their government’s attempt to make illegal any mention of the Poles’ participation in the Holocaust. There were many Polish rescuers who risked their own and their families’ lives. There were also Poles — probably more than rescuers — who persecuted Jews before, during and after the war. The government is intent on removing from museums and cultural institutions references to this aspect of Polish behavior. This is what may be called soft-core Holocaust denial, a reconfiguring of the facts to hide certain truths.

Though Neiman’s book does not concern Polish revisionism, it speaks directly to it. One of the South’s heralded sons, William Faulkner, observed about the society in whose midst he lived: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It is part of us. It determines how we approach the present.

The history wars shape far more than how we remember the past. They shape the societies we bequeath to future generations. Susan Neiman’s book is an important and welcome weapon in that battle.

Deborah E. Lipstadt’s latest book is “Antisemitism Here and Now.” She teaches the history of the Holocaust at Emory University.

Learning From the Germans
Race and the Memory of Evil
By Susan Neiman
415 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/books/review/learning-from-the-germans-susan-neiman.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Both that book's author and it's reviewer here only mentioned the 6 million Jews from the Holocaust -- totally ignoring the 9 million non-Jews also "exterminated" by the Thitd Reich...

Likewise not a mention of the treatment of America's "First Nation" native peoples -- still ongoing, and probably will remain conveniently ignored as long as mining, oil and forestry companies continue to illegally occupy 'Indian' lands..

'Wolfie wrote:

Both that book's author and it's reviewer here only mentioned the 6 million Jews from the Holocaust --  totally ignoring the 9 million non-Jews also "exterminated" by the Thitd Reich...

Likewise not a mention of the treatment of America's "First Nation" native peoples --  still ongoing, and probably will remain conveniently ignored as long as mining, oil and forestry companies continue to illegally occupy 'Indian' lands..

Well considering its talking about a comparrison with the slavery of Blacks and the Holocaust of the Jews. With how each country has dealt with each since then. I guess the main point of the article has gone straight over your head it seems

Maybe you would like to take Deborah Lipstadt to court as a Holocaust denier

Good luck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Lipstadt

phildidge wrote:

'Wolfie wrote:

Both that book's author and it's reviewer here only mentioned the 6 million Jews from the Holocaust --  totally ignoring the 9 million non-Jews also "exterminated" by the Thitd Reich...

Likewise not a mention of the treatment of America's "First Nation" native peoples --  still ongoing, and probably will remain conveniently ignored as long as mining, oil and forestry companies continue to illegally occupy 'Indian' lands..

Well considering its talking about a comparrison with the slavery of Blacks and the Holocaust of the Jews. With how each country has dealt with each since then. I guess the main point of the article has gone straight over your head it seems

Maybe you would like to take Deborah Lipstadt to court as a Holocaust denier

Good luck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Lipstadt

No, dipstick...

The truth of that review in the O/P has gone over your head -- a Jewish reviewer and a Jewish author concentrating on only 40% of the Holocaust victims..

Effectively "ignoring the forest for the trees".

P.S. I don't know why you introduced the concept of "hoocaust denier" here, either -- as that had no place in my comments..

'Wolfie wrote:

phildidge wrote:

Well considering its talking about a comparrison with the slavery of Blacks and the Holocaust of the Jews. With how each country has dealt with each since then. I guess the main point of the article has gone straight over your head it seems

Maybe you would like to take Deborah Lipstadt to court as a Holocaust denier

Good luck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Lipstadt

No,  dipstick...

The truth of that review in the O/P has gone over your head --  a Jewish reviewer and a Jewish author concentrating on only 40% of the Holocaust victims..

Effectively "ignoring the forest for the trees".

P.S. I don't know why you introduced the concept of "hoocaust denier" here, either --  as that had no place in my comments..

Acrtually you tried to look a smart ass, and ended up just looking a complete dickhead failing to understand what the article was talking about and saying

It is not ignoring anything when it is centuring on two sepcific evils in history and the effects on the nation afterwards

More so with Germany how it has even created laws around antisemitism, in regards to how Holocaust denial, but as usual because i point out your stupidity here. You act like an arse as per usuall and attempt to spoil the thread

Now just run along wetwipe and next time actually contribute to the thread instead of being a complete dick

Thanks

+1

there are two different points made here

the one you posted didge, focuses on the redemption of past wrongs and how the people of the respective countries feel about it after

wolfie brings up a good point though

there were more to the nazis than killing jews. they killed loads of people. basically anyone who they thought disagreed, or didn't have much to offer, mentally retarded, gay etc etc. it wasn't only about the jews, was it.

gelico wrote:

there are two different points made here

the one you posted didge, focuses on the redemption of past wrongs and how the people of the respective countries feel about it after

wolfie brings up a good point though

there were more to the nazis than killing jews.  they killed loads of people.  basically anyone who they thought disagreed, or didn't have much to offer, mentally retarded, gay etc etc.  it wasn't only about the jews, was it.  

Yes the nazis killed many people, but there was only one final solution, and that was in regards to exterminating the Jews. So Hence why Many Germans years after took stock of this to why the Jews were targeted this way woith reflection. Its not taking away anything from all the other victims, but centering on how Germans have come to view this. The same with how Slavery is used with the US, because again with the Civil war as parts of the southern states have never gotten over this loss. Its as I have always said in reagrds to how if the US had of abo,lished this without war as the British did. Its unlikely there would be the same resentment and  racism seen in the south today. Its simple highlight two evil acts in history and comparing how these nations have dealt with this afterwords. Hence its best looked at through the lens of two groups that were the victims.

So you could go off many wrongs by each country and then where does that leave the context of the article? I mean you go go back to when Germany had concentration camps in Namibia when they had colonies for example. So yes there was millions of other victims in the Holocaust, from the Roma, to homosexuals, to slavs etc. Everyone knows this, but its showing how on two specific victim groups, blacks and Jews. With how those countries have come to terms after with this. I fail to see how being specific on this takes anything away from other victims? Can you Gelico?