I think this book is important in contextualizing how the US could start coming to terms with our history of slavery (and, to a lesser extent, genocide) by using Germany as an example. (Not saying that the US shouldn't come to terms with our genocidal history, just that it wasn't covered much in this book other than a few brief recognitions.)

As a reader from the US, I felt like I lacked the appropriate education and understanding to truly get this book. I knew about East and West Germany due to my grade school's outdated maps and textbooks (I was in elementary school in the late 80's and early 90's), but we certainly didn't discuss any details that I can still remember 30+ years later. I learned about WWII and Nazis and the Holocaust, but not to the extent to which the author refers to it in this book. I lack the understanding that this book requires for a nuanced read.

I consider myself reasonably well-educated and more than well-read, and I struggled with connecting to this book on a deep level. The author will casually name-drop philosophers, historians, politicians, authors, and others, and not provide much background, assuming that the reader can fill in the gaps. Frequently that left me with a sense of not really getting to the details what was happening, although I followed the broad narrative.

My understanding of the nuances aside, I think the book was (on the whole, I cannot attest to the particulars) well argued and I don't disagree with the main thesis of the book: that the US can use Germany as a guide to understanding our past, and using that to move forward with anti-racism.

The only other reason I don't think this book is worthy of more stars is because it is just too damn long. It just goes on. And on. And on. Length never usually stops me from approaching, reading, or enjoying a book. But in this case I thought the book really dragged. Maybe the author felt she really had to lay it on thick enough to convince everyone... but I have a feeling the people who believe that confederate statues should remain standing in public spaces aren't exactly lining up to read this book. ( )

Starts with a powerful idea borrowed from Tzvetan Todorov: “Germans should talk about the singularity of the Holocaust, Jews should talk about its universality.” The former is taking responsibility, but a German who discusses genocide as a universal phenomenon is “seeking exoneration; if everyone commits mass murder one way or another, how could they help doing it too?” Neiman argues that, as a Jewish author, she need not argue for exact equivalence between the Holocaust and the crimes of other nations: “it’s a matter of taking responsibility for the latter,” and she is an American Jew. She investigates how Germans have confronted their pasts and compares that to the American experience. The Germans of course have several long compound words, one of which roughly translates to working-off-the-past. “The German word for debt is the same as the word for guilt; both, it seems, can be worked off with sufficient effort.” She argues that East Germany did a better job confronting and overcoming the Nazi past than West Germany, because anti-Communism was an acceptable thing for an ex-Nazi to emphasize in the West. If Germans (who might be fathers and grandfathers of the Germans confronting these questions) were after Bolsheviks, then Jews were just in the way; if fascism and communism were equal, then their fathers/grandfathers were fighting evil too. Though Westerners thought of antifascism as imposed on the East from above, by Communist rulers, Neiman suggests that’s too simple. An amazing paragraph:

Between Nazi propaganda about barbaric Bolshevik ordes and their own fear of retaliation for what the Wehrmacht had done in the Soviet Union, most Nazis preferred to await defeat in the American zone. This meant that East Germany had fewer big fish on their hands from the start, but they tried far more of those Nazis who were left than West Germany did. Most important, although the majority of the population in both East and West had been equally entwined with the Nazi cause, this was not the case with the leadership. East German leaders—in politics, civil service, media, and the arts—were antifascists in their bones, and some of those who survived had paid for it with their blood. West German leaders had been, at the least, complicit …. West Berlin refused to allow resistance heroes to speak of their wartime experiences in public schools because most of those who survived had been communists. In West Germany, serving communism was always worse than serving fascism. This became clear in monetary terms when a new pension law was passed after reunification. The years you may have spent as an SS officer or driving a cattle car to Auschwitz were counted toward your pension. The years you may have spent doing obligatory military service in the GDR or driving an ordinary train there were not.

(In 1953, sufficiently documented Auschwitz survivors could receive $450 for each year spent there, less than the pensions paid to former SS guards and their widows.) That isn’t to say that East Germany didn’t use antifascism “as an excuse to conceal its own injustice and repression”; she agrees that it did. But even if it was in part a foreign policy tool, antifascism was itself a good thing, just like civil rights legislation in the US that was in part anticommunist propaganda to rebut Soviet critiques of US segregation.

Neiman suggests that the recent rise of right-wing sentiment in the East comes from resentment at longstanding Western scorn for East Germans. This contempt became economic policy: since pensions were calculated on the basis of lifetime salaries, and since East Germans had most basics like rent and food subsidized and correspondingly low salaries, they now get less in retirement, and can be furious at refugees getting state support.

Neiman also compares US memory and forgetting, including how James Meredith objects to the monument to him at the University of Mississippi that includes a “butchered, out-of-context quotation from my 1966 book … expressing my love for the land of Mississippi but making no mention of my hatred of its ruling system of white supremacy.” But I learned less simply because I already know much more about our history of reckoning with atrocity, or mostly of failing to do so. (I read this months ago, before the news cycle became full of too many whites’ demand that we forget most of our racist history.) ( )

In "Learning from the Germans", Susan Neiman compares and contrasts how Germany came to grips with its treatment of the Jewish people in the 1930's - 1940's under Nazi leadership, and how Americans came to grips with its treatment of slaves and blacks in the Jim Crow era in the early 1900's.

It's an interesting way to consider current and past behavior. There are many Confederate monuments being removed from public buildings and settings in Southern States in the past several years, and many locals object to the removal of these statues of historical leaders and military heros. Similarly, the continued flying of the Confederate Flag, the Stars and Bars, in the South has been considered an affront to many, yet locals feel this is a tribute to their land and peoples.

But, thinking about the same problems in post War Germany, not many would object to the removal of tributes to Hitler, Goring, or Rommel, or the Nazi flag in Germany now. Neiman, describes her time living in Germany, and how German attitudes changed in post-war Germany, and how the nation healed their scars. She also provides a similar look at how views on race and slavery have evolved in the United States. ( )

What can Americans learn from the Germans about "working off our past" in terms of slavery? Susan Neiman, an American Jew who has taught philosophy in Israel and now lives in Berlin, offers insight into the process. This book is a dense read which has significantly impacted this reader in terms of post WWII life in Germany and post Civil War behavior in the United States. The author invites the reader to consider engaging in the painful process of trying to own our collective national past while simultaneously moving forward, a complex, non-linear process that may well take multiple generations. Let's get started! Read this book for inspiration! ( )

One need only look at polls of white americans showing that the majority continue to believe they are more discriminated against than African-Americans to understand that America never properly reckoned with its history of slavery, apartheid, and unjust legal systems.
The author here does a fantastic job showing how a country can reckon with its history and become better for it. She argues convincingly that Germany today is a successful country partly because of its ability to engage with the Nazi past and admit its role in them.
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